11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  The man with the card tucked into the brim of his hat is waiting for me beside the drying shed. I can feel him there. Maybe he’s not sending out thought-waves, but it sure feels like it. Come back. You don’t have to be the Jimla. It’s not too late to be Jake again. To be the good guy, the good angel. Never mind saving the president; save the world. Do it while there’s still time.

  Yes.

  I will.

  Probably I will.

  Tomorrow.

  Tomorrow will be soon enough, won’t it?

  10/1/58

  Still here at the Tamarack. Still writing.

  My uncertainty about Clayton is the worst. Clayton is what I thought about as I screwed the last of my refills into my trusty fountain pen, and he’s what I’m thinking about now. If I knew she was going to be safe from him, I think I could let go. Will John Clayton still turn up at Sadie’s house on Bee Tree Lane if I subtract myself from the equation? Maybe seeing us together was what finally drove him over the edge. But he followed her to Texas even before he knew about us, and if he does it again, this time he might cut her throat instead of her cheek. Deke and I wouldn’t be there to stop him, certainly.

  Only maybe he did know about us. Sadie might have written a friend back in Savannah, and the friend might have told a friend, and the news that Sadie was spending time with a guy—one who didn’t know the imperatives of the broom—might finally have gotten back to her ex. If none of that happened because I wasn’t there, Sadie would be all right.

  The lady or the tiger?

  I don’t know, I don’t know.

  The weather is turning toward autumn.

  10/6/58

  I went to the drive-in last night. It’s the last weekend for them. On Monday they’ll put up a sign that says CLOSED FOR THE SEASON and add something like TWICE AS FINE IN ’59! The last program consisted of two short subjects, a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and another pair of horror movies, Macabre and The Tingler. I took my usual folding chair and watched Macabre without really seeing it. I was cold. I have money to buy a coat, but now I’m afraid to buy much of anything. I keep thinking about the changes it could cause.

  When the first feature ended, I did go into the snackbar, however. I wanted some hot coffee. (Thinking This can’t change much, also thinking How do you know.) When I came out, there was only one child in the kiddie playground that would have been full at intermission only a month ago. It was a girl wearing a jean jacket and bright red pants. She was jumping rope. She looked like Rosette Templeton.

  “I went down the road, the road was a-muddy,” she chanted. “I stubbed my toe, my toe was a-bloody. You all here? Count two an three an four and fi’! My true love’s a butterfly!”

  I couldn’t stay. I was shivering too hard.

  Maybe poets can kill the world for love, but not ordinary little guys like me. Tomorrow, supposing the rabbit-hole is still there, I’m going back. But before I do …

  Coffee wasn’t the only thing I bought in the snackbar.

  10/7/58

  The lockbox from the Western Auto is on the bed, standing open. The spade is in the closet (what the maid thought about that I have no idea). The ink in my last refill is running low, but that’s okay; another two or three pages will bring me to the end. I’ll put the manuscript in the lockbox, then bury it near the pond where I once disposed of my cell phone. I’ll bury it deep in that soft dark soil. Perhaps someday, someone will find it. Maybe it will be you. If there is a future and there is a you, that is. This is something I will soon find out.

  I tell myself (hopefully, fearfully) that my three weeks in the Tamarack can’t have changed much; Al spent four years in the past and came back to an intact present … although I admit I have wondered about his possible relationship to the World Trade Center holocaust or the big Japanese earthquake. I tell myself there is no connection … but still I wonder.

  I should also tell you that I no longer think of 2011 as the present. Philip Nolan was the Man Without a Country; I am the Man Without a Time Frame. I suspect I always will be. Even if 2011 is still there, I will be a visiting stranger.

  Beside me on the desk is a postcard featuring a photo of cars pulled up in front of a big screen. That’s the only kind of card they sell in the Lisbon Drive-In snackbar. I have written the message, and I have written the address: Mr. Deacon Simmons, Jodie High School, Jodie, Texas. I started to write Denholm Consolidated High School, but JHS won’t become DCHS until next year or the year after.

  The message reads: Dear Deke: When your new librarian comes, watch out for her. She’s going to need a good angel, particularly in April of 1963. Please believe me.

  No, Jake, I hear the Ocher Card Man whisper. If John Clayton is supposed to kill her and doesn’t, changes will occur … and, as you’ve seen for yourself, the changes are never for the better. No matter how good your intentions are.

  But it’s Sadie! I tell him, and although I’ve never been what you’d call a crying man, now the tears begin to come. They ache, they burn. It’s Sadie and I love her! How can I just stand by when he may kill her?

  The reply is as obdurate as the past itself: Close the circle.

  So I tear the postcard into pieces, I put them in the room’s ashtray, I set them on fire. There’s no smoke alarm to blare to the world what I have done. There’s only the rasping sound of my sobs. It’s as though I have killed her with my own hands. Soon I’ll bury my lockbox with the manuscript inside, and then I’ll go back to Lisbon Falls, where the Ocher Card Man will no doubt be very glad to see me. I won’t call a cab; I intend to walk the whole way, under the stars. I guess I want to say goodbye. Hearts don’t really break. If only they could.

  Right now I’m going nowhere except over to the bed, where I will lay my wet face on the pillow and pray to a God I can’t quite believe in to send my Sadie some good angel so she can live. And love. And dance.

  Goodbye, Sadie.

  You never knew me, but I love you, honey.

  Citizen of the Century (2012)

  1

  I imagine the Home of the Famous Fatburger is gone now, replaced by an L.L. Bean Express, but I don’t know for sure; that’s something I’ve never bothered to check on the internet. All I know is that it was still there when I got back from all my adventures. And the world around it, too.

  So far, at least.

  I don’t know about the Bean Express because that was my last day in Lisbon Falls. I went back to my house in Sabattus, caught up on my sleep, then packed two suitcases and my cat and drove south. I stopped for gas in a small Massachusetts town called Westborough, and decided it looked good enough for a man with no particular prospects and no expectations from life.

  I stayed that first night in the Westborough Hampton Inn. There was Wi-Fi. I got on the net—my heart beating so hard it sent dots flashing across my field of vision—and called up the Dallas Morning News website. After punching in my credit card number (a process that took several retries because of my shaking fingers), I was able to access the archives. The story about an unknown assailant taking a shot at Edwin Walker was there on April 11 of 1963, but nothing about Sadie on April 12. Nothing the following week, or the week after that. I kept hunting.

  I found the story I was looking for in the issue for April 30.

  2

  MENTAL PATIENT SLASHES EX-WIFE, COMMITS SUICIDE

  By Ernie Calvert

  (JODIE) 77-year-old Deacon “Deke” Simmons and Denholm Consolidated School District Principal Ellen Dockerty arrived too late on Sunday night to save Sadie Dunhill from being seriously hurt, but things could have been much worse for the popular 28-year-old school librarian.

  According to Douglas Reems, the Jodie town constable, “If Deke and Ellie hadn’t arrived when they did, Miss Dunhill almost certainly would have been killed.”

  The two educators had come with a tuna casserole and a bread pudding. Neither wanted to talk about their heroic intervention. Simmons would only say, “I wish we’d gotten there sooner.” />
  According to Constable Reems, Simmons overpowered the much younger John Clayton, of Savannah, Georgia, after Miss Dockerty threw the casserole at him, distracting him. Simmons wrestled away a small revolver. Clayton then produced the knife with which he had cut his ex-wife’s face and used it to slash his own throat. Simmons and Miss Dockerty tried to stop the bleeding to no avail. Clayton was pronounced dead at the scene.

  Miss Dockerty told Constable Reems that Clayton may have been stalking his ex-wife for months. The staff at Denholm Consolidated had been alerted that Miss Dunhill’s ex-husband might be dangerous, and Miss Dunhill herself had provided a photograph of Clayton, but Principal Dockerty said he had disguised his appearance.

  Miss Dunhill was transported by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where her condition is listed as fair.

  3

  Never a crying man, that’s me, but I made up for it that night. That night I cried myself to sleep, and for the first time in a very long time, my sleep was deep and restful.

  Alive.

  She was alive.

  Scarred for life—oh yes, undoubtedly—but alive.

  Alive, alive, alive.

  4

  The world was still there, and it still harmonized … or perhaps I made it harmonize. When we make that harmony ourselves, I guess we call it habit. I caught on as a sub in the Westborough school system, then caught on full-time. It did not surprise me that the principal at the local high school was a gung-ho football freak named Borman … as in a certain jolly coach I’d once known in another place. I stayed in touch with my old friends from Lisbon Falls for awhile, and then I didn’t. C’est la vie.

  I checked the Dallas Morning News archives again, and discovered a short item in the May 29 issue from 1963: JODIE LIBRARIAN LEAVES HOSPITAL. It was short and largely uninformative. Nothing about her condition and nothing about her future plans. And no photo. Squibs buried on page 20, between ads for discount furniture and door-to-door sales opportunities, never come with photos. It’s one of life’s great truisms, like the way the phone always rings while you’re on the john or in the shower.

  In the year after I came back to the Land of Now, there were some sites and some search topics I steered clear of. Was I tempted? Of course. But the net is a double-edged sword. For every thing you find that’s of comfort—like discovering that the woman you loved survived her crazy ex-husband—there are two with the power to hurt. A person searching for news of a certain someone might discover that that someone had been killed in an accident. Or died of lung cancer as a result of smoking. Or committed suicide, in the case of this particular someone most likely accomplished with a combination of booze and sleeping pills.

  Sadie alone, with no one to slap her awake and stick her in a cold shower. If that had happened, I didn’t want to know.

  I used the internet to prep for my classes, I used it to check the movie listings, and once or twice a week I checked out the latest viral videos. What I didn’t do was check for news of Sadie. I suppose that if Jodie had had a newspaper I might have been even more tempted, but it hadn’t had one then and surely didn’t now, when that very same internet was slowly strangling the print media. Besides, there’s an old saying: peek not through a knothole, lest ye be vexed. Was there ever a bigger knothole in human history than the internet?

  She survived Clayton. It would be best, I told myself, to let my knowledge of Sadie end there.

  5

  It might have, had I not gotten a transfer student in my AP English class. In April of 2012, this was; it might even have been on April 10, the forty-ninth anniversary of the attempted Edwin Walker assassination. Her name was Erin Tolliver, and her family had moved to Westborough from Kileen, Texas.

  That was a name I knew well. Kileen, where I had bought rubbers from a druggist with a nastily knowing smile. Don’t do anything against the law, son, he’d advised me. Kileen, where Sadie and I had shared a great many sweet nights at the Candlewood Bungalows.

  Kileen, which had had a newspaper called The Weekly Gazette.

  During her second week of classes—by then my new AP student had made several new girlfriends, had fascinated several boys, and was settling in nicely—I asked Erin if The Weekly Gazette still published. Her face lit up. “You’ve been to Kileen, Mr. Epping?”

  “I was there a long time ago,” I said—a statement that wouldn’t have caused a lie detector needle to budge even slightly.

  “It’s still there. Mama used to say she only got it to wrap the fish in.”

  “Does it still run the ‘Jodie Doin’s’ column?”

  “It runs a ‘Doin’s’ column for every little town south of Dallas,” Erin said, giggling. “I bet you could find it on the net if you really wanted to, Mr. Epping. Everything’s on the net.”

  She was absolutely right about that, and I held out for exactly one week. Sometimes the knothole is just too tempting.

  6

  My intention was simple: I would go to the archive (assuming The Weekly Gazette had one) and search for Sadie’s name. It was against my better judgment, but Erin Tolliver had inadvertently stirred up feelings that had begun to settle, and I knew I wouldn’t rest easy again until I checked. As it turned out, the archive was unnecessary. I found what I was looking for not in the ‘Jodie Doin’s’ column but on the first page of the current issue.

  JODIE PICKS “CITIZEN OF THE CENTURY” FOR JULY CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, the headline read. And the picture below the headline … she was eighty now, but some faces you don’t forget. The photographer might have suggested that she turn her head so the left side was hidden, but Sadie faced the camera head-on. And why not? It

  was an old scar now, the wound inflicted by a man many years in his grave. I thought it lent character to her face, but of course, I was prejudiced. To the loving eye, even smallpox scars are beautiful.

  In late June, after school was out, I packed a suitcase and once again headed for Texas.

  7

  Dusk of a summer night in the town of Jodie, Texas. It’s a little bigger than it was in 1963, but not much. There’s a box factory in the part of town where Sadie Dunhill once lived on Bee Tree Lane. The barber shop is gone, and the Cities Service station where I once bought gas for my Sunliner is now a 7-Eleven. There’s a Subway where Al Stevens once sold Prongburgers and Mesquite Fries.

  The speeches commemorating Jodie’s centennial are over. The one given by the woman chosen by the Historical Society and Town Council as the Citizen of the Century was charmingly brief, that of the mayor longwinded but informative. I learned that Sadie had served one term as mayor herself and four terms in the Texas State Legislature, but that was the least of it. There was her charitable work, her ceaseless efforts to improve the quality of education at DCHS, and her year’s sabbatical to do volunteer work in post-Katrina New Orleans. There was the Texas State Library program for blind students, an initiative to improve hospital services for veterans, and her ceaseless (and continuing, even at eighty) efforts to provide better state services to the indigent mentally ill. In 1996 she had been offered a chance to run for the U.S. Congress but declined, saying she had plenty to do at the grassroots.

  She never remarried. She never left Jodie. She’s still tall, her body unbent by osteoporosis. And she’s still beautiful, her long white hair flowing down her back almost to her waist.

  Now the speeches are over, and Main Street has been closed off. A banner at each end of the two-block business section proclaims

  STREET DANCE, 7PM–MIDNITE!

  Y’ALL COME!

  Sadie is surrounded by well-wishers—some of whom I think I still recognize—so I take a walk down to the DJ’s platform in front of what used to be the Western Auto and is now a Walgreens. The guy fussing with the records and CDs is a sixty-something with thinning gray hair and a considerable paunch, but I’d know those square-bear pink-rimmed specs anywhere.

  “Hello, Donald,” I say. “See you’ve still got the round mound of sound.”<
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  Donald Bellingham looks up and smiles. “Never leave for the gig without it. Do I know you?”

  “No,” I say, “my mom. She was at a dance you DJ’d way back in the early sixties. She said you snuck in your father’s big band records.”

  He grins. “Yeah, I caught hell for that. Who was your mother?”

  “Andrea Robertson,” I say, picking the name at random. Andrea was my best pupil in period two American Lit.

  “Sure, I remember her.” His vague smile says he doesn’t.

  “I don’t suppose you still have any of those old records, do you?”

  “God, no. Long gone. But I’ve got all kinds of big band stuff on CD. Do I feel a request coming on?”

  “Actually, you do. But it’s kind of special.”

  He laughs. “Ain’t they all.”

  I tell him what I want, and Donald—as eager to please as ever—agrees. As I start back toward the end of the block, where the woman I came to see is now being helped to punch by the mayor, Donald calls after me. “I never caught your name.”

  “Amberson,” I tell him over my shoulder. “George Amberson.”

  “And you want it at eight-fifteen?”

  “On the dot. Time is of the essence, Donald. Let’s hope it cooperates.”

  Five minutes later, Donald Bellingham nukes Jodie with “At the Hop” and dancers fill the street under the Texas sunset.

  8

  At ten past eight, Donald plays a slow Alan Jackson tune, one even grown-ups can dance to. Sadie is left alone for the first time since the speechifying ended, and I approach her. My heart beating so hard it seems to shake my whole body.

  “Miz Dunhill?”

  She turns, smiling and looking up a little. She’s tall, but I’m taller. Always was. “Yes?”

  “My name is George Amberson. I wanted to tell you how much I admire you and all the good work you’ve done.”

  Her smile grows a little puzzled. “Thank you, sir. I don’t recognize you, but the name seems familiar. Are you from Jodie?”

  I can no longer travel in time, and I certainly can’t read minds, but I know what she’s thinking, just the same. I hear that name in my dreams.