11/22/63 Кинг Стивен

Big men were running across the lawn. Three of them. One had a short length of pipe that looked to be wrapped in something.

No, actually there were enough guys to play bridge. The fourth was Akiva Roth, and he wasn’t running. He was strolling up the walk with his hands in his pockets and a placid smile on his face.

I slammed the door. I twisted the thumb bolt. I had barely finished when it exploded open. I ran for the bedroom and got about halfway.

15

Two of Roth’s goons dragged me into the kitchen. The third was the one with the pipe. It was wrapped in strips of dark felt. I saw this when he laid it carefully on the table where I had eaten a good many meals. He put on yellow rawhide gloves.

Roth leaned in the doorway, still smiling placidly. “Eduardo Gutierrez has syphilis,” he announced. “It’s gone to his brain. He’ll be dead in eighteen months, but you know what? He don’t care. He believes he’s gonna come back as an Arab emirate, or sumshit. How ’bout that, huh?”

Responding to non sequiturs—at cocktail parties, on public transportation, in ticket lines at the movie theater—is dicey enough, but it’s really hard to know what to say when you’re being held by two men and about to receive a beating from a third. So I said nothing.

“The thing is, you got in his head. You won bets you weren’t supposed to win. Sometimes you lost, but Eddie G got this crazy idea that when you lost, you were losing on purpose. You know? Then you hit big on the Derby, and he decided you were, I dunno, some kind of telepathic gizmo who could see the future. Did you know he burned down your house?”

I said nothing.

“Then,” Roth said, “when those little wormies really started to bite his brain, he started to think you were some kind of ghoul, or devil. He put out the word all over the South, the West, the Midwest. ‘Look for this guy Amberson, and bring him down. Kill him. The guy is unnatral. I could smell it on im but I didn’t pay attention. Now look at me, sick and dying. And it’s this guy’s fault. He’s a ghoul or a devil, or sumshit.’ Crazy, you know? Toys in the attic.”

I said nothing.

“Carmo, I don’t think my friend Georgie’s listening. I think he’s dozing off. Give him a wake-up call.”

The man in the yellow rawhide gloves swung a Tom Case uppercut, bringing it from hip level to the left side of my face. Pain exploded in my head, and for a few moments I saw everything on that side through a scarlet haze.

“Okay, you look a little more awake now,” Roth said. “Where was I? Oh, I know. How you turned into Eddie G’s private boogeyman. Because of the syph, we all knew that. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been some barbershop dog. Or a girl who jerked him off too hard at the drive-in when he was sixteen. Sometimes he can’t remember his own address, he has to call someone to come get him. Sad, huh? It’s those worms in his head. But everybody humors him, because Eddie was always a good guy. He could tell a joke, man, you’d laugh until you cried. Nobody even thought you were real. Then Eddie G’s boogeyman turns up in Dallas, at my shop. And what happens? The boogeyman bets on the Pirates to beat the Yankees, which everyone knows ain’t gonna happen, and in seven games, which everyone knows the Series ain’t gonna go.”

“It was just luck,” I said. My voice sounded furry, because the side of my mouth was swelling. “An impulse bet.”

“That’s just stupid, and stupidity always got to be paid for. Carmo, kneecap this stupid sonofabitch.”

“No!” I said. “No, please don’t do that!”

Carmo smiled as if I’d said something cute, plucked the felt-wrapped pipe from the table, and swung it at my left knee. I heard something down there make a popping sound. Like a big knuckle. The pain was exquisite. I bit back a scream and sagged against the men who were holding me. They yanked me back up.

Roth stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, smiling his happy placid smile. “Okay. Cool. That’s gonna swell, by the way. You won’t believe how big it’s gonna get. But hey, you bought it, you paid for it, you own it. Meanwhile, the facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.” The goons holding me laughed.

“The facts are nobody dressed like you was on the day you came into my store makes a bet like that. For a man dressed like you was, an impulse bet is ten dollars, a double sawbuck at most. But the Pirates came through, that is also the facts. And I’m starting to think Eddie G might be right. Not that you’re a devil or a ghoul or an ESP gizmo, nothing like that, but how about maybe you know somebody who knows something? Like the fix is in and the Pirates are supposed to win in seven?”

“Nobody fixes baseball, Roth. Not since the Black Sox in 1919. You run a book, you must know that.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You know my name! Hey, maybe you are an ESP guy. But I ain’t got all day.”

He glanced at his watch, as if to confirm this. It was big and clunky, probably a Rolex.

“I try to see where you live when you come in to collect, but you hold your thumb over your address. That’s okay. Lotta guys do that. I decide I’m gonna let it go. I should send some boys down the street to beat the shit out of you, maybe even kill you so that Eddie G’s mind—what’s left of it—can be at rest? Because some guy took shit odds and beat me out of twelve hundred? Fuck that, what Eddie G don’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, with you out of the way, he’d just start thinking about something else. Maybe that Henry Ford was the Annie Christ or sumshit. Carmo, he’s not listening again and that pisses me off.”

Carmo swung the pipe at my midsection. It struck me below the ribs with paralyzing force. There was pain, first jagged, then swallowed in a growing explosion of heat, like a fireball.

“Hurts, don’t it?” Carmo said. “Gets you right in the old kazeenie.”

“I think you ruptured something,” I said. I heard a hoarse steam-engine sound and realized that was me, panting.

“I hope he fucking did,” Roth said. “I let you go, you dumbbell! I fucking let you go! I forgot about you! Then you turn up at Frank’s in Fort Worth to bet the goddam Case-Tiger fight. Exact same MO—big bet on the underdog and all the odds you can get. This time you predict the exact fucking round. So here’s what’s going to happen, my friend: you’re going to tell me how you knew. If you do that, I take some pictures of you like you are now and Eddie G’s satisfied. He knows he can’t have you dead, because Carlos told him no, and Carlos is the one guy he listens to, even now. But if he sees you fucked up… aw, but you ain’t fucked up enough quite yet. Fuck him up some more, Carmo. Do the face.”

So Carmo hammered my face while the other two held me. He broke my nose, closed my left eye, knocked out a few teeth, and tore open my left cheek. I kept thinking, I’ll pass out or they’ll kill me, either way the pain will stop. But I didn’t pass out, and at some point Carmo quit. He was breathing hard, and there were red splotches on his yellow rawhide gloves. Sunshine came in through the kitchen windows and made cheery oblongs on the faded linoleum.

“That’s better,” Roth said. “Get the Polaroid out of the truck, Carmo. Hustle, now. I want to finish up here.”

Before leaving, Carmo stripped off his gloves and put them on the table next to the lead pipe. Some of the felt strips had come loose. They were soaked with blood. My face was throbbing, but my abdomen was worse. There, the heat continued to spread. Something was very wrong down there.

“One more time, Amberson. How’d you know the fix was in? Who told you? The truth.”

“It was just a guess.” I tried to tell myself I sounded like a man with a bad cold, but I didn’t. I sounded like a man who’d just had the shit beaten out of him.

He picked up the pipe and tapped it against one pudgy hand. “Who told you, fuckface?”

“Nobody. Gutierrez was right. I’m a devil, and devils can see the future.”

“You’re running out of chances.”

“Wanda’s too tall for you, Roth. And too skinny. When you’re on top of her, you must look like a toad trying to fuck a log. Or maybe—”

His placid face wrinkled into rage. It was a complete transformation, and it happened in less than a second. He swung the pipe at my head. I got my left arm up and heard it crack like a birch-branch overloaded with ice. This time when I sagged, the goons let me drop to the floor.

“Fuckin wiseass, how I hate a fuckin wiseass.” This seemed to come from a great distance. Or a great height. Or both. I was finally getting ready to pass out, and ever so grateful to go. But I had enough vision left to see Carmo when he came back in with a Polaroid camera. It was big and bulky, the kind where the lens comes out on a kind of accordion.

“Turn im over,” Roth said. “Let’s get his good side.” As the goons did so, Carmo handed Roth the camera, and Roth handed Carmo the pipe. Then Roth raised the camera to his face and said, “Watch the birdie, you fuckin spunkbucket. Here’s one for Eddie G…”

Flash.

“…and one for my own personal collection, which I don’t actually have but which I may now start…”

Flash.

“…and here’s one for you. To remember that when serious people ask you questions, you should answer.”

Flash.

He yanked the third shot out of the camera and threw it in my direction. It landed in front of my left hand… which he then stepped on. Bones crunched. I whimpered and drew my hurt hand back to my chest. He had broken at least one finger, maybe as many as three.

“You want to remember to strip that in sixty seconds, or it’ll get all overcooked. If you’re awake, that is.”

“You want to ask im some more now that he’s tenderized?” Carmo asked.

“You kiddin? Look at im. He don’t even know his own name anymore. Fuck him.” He started to turn away, then turned back. “Hey, asshat. Here’s one to grow on.”

That was when he kicked me in the side of the head with what felt like a steel-toed shoe. Skyrockets exploded across my vision. Then the back of my head connected with the baseboard, and I was gone.

16

I don’t think I was out for long, because the oblongs of sunlight on the linoleum didn’t appear to have moved. My mouth tasted of wet copper. I spat half-congealed blood onto the floor, along with a fragment of tooth, and set about getting to my feet. I needed to hold onto one of the kitchen chairs with my one working hand, then onto the table (which nearly fell over on top of me), but on the whole it was easier than I thought. My left leg felt numb, and my pants were tight halfway down, where the knee was swelling as promised, but I thought it could have been a lot worse.

I looked out the window to make sure the panel truck was gone, then began a slow, limping journey into the bedroom. My heart was taking big soft walloping beats in my chest. Each one throbbed in my broken nose and vibrated the swelling left side of my face, where the cheekbone just about had to be broken. The back of my head throbbed, too. My neck was stiff.

Could have been worse, I reminded myself as I shuffled across the bedroom. You’re on your feet, aren’t you? Just get the damn gun, put it in the glove compartment, then drive yourself to the emergency room. You’re basically all right. Probably better than Dick Tiger is this morning.

I was able to go on telling myself that until I stretched my hand up to the closet shelf. When I did that, something first pulled in my guts… and then seemed to roll. The sullen heat centered on my left side flared like coals when you throw gasoline on them. I got my fingertips on the butt of the gun, turned it, hooked a thumb into the trigger-guard, and pulled it off the shelf. It hit the floor and bounced into the bedroom.

Probably not even loaded. I bent over to get it. My left knee shrieked and gave way. I fell to the floor, and the pain in my guts whooshed up again. I got the gun, though, and rolled the cylinder. It was loaded after all. Every chamber. I put it in my pocket and tried to crawl back to the kitchen, but the knee was too painful. And the headache was worse, spreading out dark tentacles from its little cave above the nape of my neck.

I made it to the bed on my belly, using a swimming motion. Once I was there I managed to haul myself up again, using my right arm and right leg. The left leg held me, but I was losing flexion in the knee. I had to get out of there, and right away.

I must have looked like Chester, the limping deputy from Gunsmoke, as I made my way out of the bedroom, across the kitchen, and to the front door, which hung open with splinters around the lock. I even remember thinking Mr. Dillon, Mr. Dillon, there’s trouble down at the Longbranch!

I crossed the porch, seized the railing in my right fist, and crabbed down to the walk. There were only four steps, but my headache got worse each time I jolted down another one. I seemed to be losing my peripheral vision, which couldn’t be good. I tried to turn my head to see my Chevrolet, but my neck didn’t want to cooperate. I managed a shuffling whole-body pivot instead, and when I had the car in my sights, I realized driving would be an impossibility. Even opening the passenger side door and stowing the gun in the glove compartment would be an impossibility: bending would cause the pain and heat in my side to explode again.

I fumbled the .38 out of my pocket and returned to the porch. I held the stair-rail and underhanded the gun beneath the steps. It would have to do. I straightened up again and made my slow way down the walk to the street. Baby steps, I told myself. Little baby steps.

Two kids came sailing up on bikes. I tried to tell them I needed help, but the only thing to come out of my swollen mouth was a dry hhhahhhh sound. They glanced at each other, then pedaled faster and swerved around me.

I turned to the right (my swollen knee made going left seem like the world’s worst idea) and began to stagger down the sidewalk. My vision continued to close in; now I seemed to be peering out of a gunslit, or from the mouth of a tunnel. For a moment that made me think of the fallen smokestack at the Kitchener Ironworks, back in Derry.

Get to Haines Avenue, I told myself. There’ll be traffic on Haines Avenue. You have to get at least that far.

But was I going toward Haines, or away from it? I couldn’t remember. The visible world was down to a single sharp circle about six inches in diameter. My head was splitting; there was a forest fire in my guts. When I fell, it seemed to be in slow motion, and the sidewalk felt as soft as a feather-pillow.

Before I could pass out, something prodded me. A hard, metallic something. A rusty voice eight or ten miles above me said, “You! You, boy! What’s wrong with you?”

I turned over. It took the last of my strength, but I managed. Towering above me was the elderly woman who’d called me a coward when I refused to step in between Lee and Marina on The Day of the Zipper. It might have been that day, because, August heat or no August heat, she was once more wearing the pink flannel nightgown and the quilted jacket. Perhaps because I still had boxing on what remained of my mind, her upstanding hair today reminded me of Don King instead of Elsa Lanchester. She had poked me with one of the front legs of her walker.

“Ohmydeargod,” she said. “Who has beaten you?”

That was a long story, and I couldn’t tell it. The dark was closing in, and I was glad because the pain in my head was killing me. Al got lung cancer, I thought. I got Akiva Roth. Either way, game over. Ozzie wins.

Not if I could help it.

Gathering all my strength, I spoke to the face far above me, the only bright thing left in the encroaching darkness. “Call… nine-one-one.”

“What’s that?”

Of course she didn’t know. Nine-one-one hadn’t been invented yet. I held on long enough to try one more time. “Ambulance.”

I think I might have repeated it, but I’m not sure. That was when the darkness swallowed me.

17

I have wondered since if it was kids who stole my car, or Roth’s goons. And when it happened. At any rate, the thieves didn’t trash it or crash it; Deke Simmons picked it up in the DPD impound lot a week later. It was in far better shape than I was.

Time-travel is full of ironies.

CHAPTER 26

During the next eleven weeks I once more lived two lives. There was the one I hardly knew about—the outside life—and the one I knew all too well. That was the one inside, where I often dreamed of the Yellow Card Man.

In the outside life, the walker-lady (Alberta Hitchinson; Sadie sought her out and brought her a bouquet of flowers) stood over me on the sidewalk and hollered until a neighbor came out, saw the situation, and called the ambulance that took me to Parkland. The doctor who treated me there was Malcolm Perry, who would later treat both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald as they lay dying. With me he had better luck, although it was a close thing.

I had sustained broken teeth, a broken nose, a broken cheekbone, a fractured left knee, a broken left arm, dislocated fingers, and abdominal injuries. I had also suffered a brain injury, which was what concerned Perry the most.

I was told I woke up and howled when my belly was palpated, but I have no memory of it. I was catheterized and immediately began pissing what boxing announcers would have called “the claret.” My vitals were at first stable, then began sliding. I was typed, cross-matched, and given four units of whole blood… which, Sadie told me later, the residents of Jodie made up a hundred times over at a community blood drive in late September. She had to tell me several times, because I kept forgetting. I was prepped for abdominal surgery, but first a neurology consult and a spinal tap—there’s no such thing as CT scans or MRIs in the Land of Ago.

I’m also told I had a conversation with two of the nurses prepping me for the tap. I told them that my wife had a drinking problem. One of them said that was too bad and asked me what her name was. I told them she was a fish called Wanda and laughed quite heartily. Then I passed out again.

My spleen was trashed. They removed it.

While I was still conked out and my spleen was going wherever no longer useful but not absolutely vital organs go, I was turned over to Orthopedics. There my broken arm was put in a splint and my broken leg in a plaster cast. Many people signed it over the following weeks. Sometimes I knew the names; usually I didn’t.

I was kept sedated with my head stabilized and my bed raised to exactly thirty degrees. The phenobarbital wasn’t because I was conscious (although sometimes I muttered, Sadie said) but because they were afraid I might suddenly come around and damage myself further. Basically, Perry and the other docs (Ellerton also came in regularly to monitor my progress) were treating my battered chump like an unexploded bomb.

To this day I’m not entirely sure what hematocrit and hemoglobin are, but mine started to come back up and that pleased everybody. I had another spinal tap three days later. This one showed signs of old blood, and when it comes to spinal taps, old is better than new. It indicated that I had sustained significant brain trauma, but they could forgo drilling a burr-hole in my skull, a risky procedure given all the battles my body was fighting on other fronts.

But the past is obdurate and protects itself against change. Five days after I was admitted, the flesh around the splenectomy incision began to turn red and warm. The following day the incision reopened and I spiked a fever. My condition, which had been downgraded from critical to serious after the second spinal tap, zipped back up to critical. According to my chart, I was “sedated as per Dr. Perry and neurologically minimally responsive.”

On September seventh, I woke up briefly. Or so I’m told. A woman, pretty despite her scarred face, and an old man with a cowboy hat in his lap were sitting by my bed.

“Do you know your name?” the woman asked.

“Puddentane,” I said. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”

Mr. Jake George Puddentane Epping-Amberson spent seven weeks in Parkland before being moved to a rehab center—a little housing complex for sick people—on the north side of Dallas. During those seven weeks I was on IV antibiotics for the infection that had set up shop where my spleen used to be. The splint on my broken arm was replaced with a long cast, which also filled up with names I didn’t know. Shortly before moving to Eden Fallows, the rehab center, I graduated to a short cast on my arm. Around that same time, a physical therapist began to torture my knee back to something resembling mobility. I was told I screamed a lot, but I don’t remember.

Malcolm Perry and the rest of the Parkland staff saved my life, I have no doubt about that. They also gave me an unintended and unwelcome gift that lasted well into my time at Eden Fallows. This was a secondary infection caused by the antibiotics being pumped into my system to beat the primary one. I have hazy memories of vomiting and of spending what seemed like whole days with my ass on a bedpan. I remember thinking at one point I have to go to the Derry Drug and see Mr. Keene. I need Kaopectate. But who was Mr. Keene, and where was Derry?

They let me out of the hospital when I began to hold food down again, but I’d been at Eden Fallows almost two weeks before the diarrhea stopped. By then it was nearing the end of October. Sadie (usually I remembered her name; sometimes it slipped my mind) brought me a paper jack-o’-lantern. This memory is very clear, because I screamed when I saw it. They were the screams of someone who has forgotten something vitally important.

“What?” she asked me. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong? Is it Kennedy? Something about Kennedy?”

“He’s going to kill them all with a hammer!” I shouted at her. “On Halloween night! I have to stop him!”

“Who?” She took my waving hands, her face frightened. “Stop who?”

But I couldn’t remember, and I fell asleep. I slept a lot, and not just because of the slowly healing head injury. I was exhausted, little more than a ghost of my former self. On the day of the beating, I had weighed one hundred and eighty-five pounds. By the time I was released from the hospital and installed in Eden Fallows, I weighed a hundred and thirty-eight.

That was the outside life of Jake Epping, a man who had been beaten badly, then nearly died in the hospital. My inside life was blackness, voices, and flashes of understanding that were like lightning: they blinded me with their brilliance and were gone again before I could get more than glimpses of the landscape by their light. I was mostly lost, but every now and then I found myself.

Found myself hellishly hot, and a woman was feeding me ice chips that tasted heavenly cool. This was THE WOMAN WITH THE SCAR, who was sometimes Sadie.

Found myself on the commode in the corner of the room with no idea how I’d gotten there, unloosing what felt like gallons of watery burning shit, my side itching and throbbing, my knee bellowing. I remember wishing someone would kill me.

Found myself trying to get out of bed, because I had to do something terribly important. It seemed to me that the whole world was depending on me to do this thing. THE MAN WITH THE COWBOY HAT was there. He caught me and helped me back into bed before I fell on the floor. “Not yet, son,” he said. “You’re nowhere near strong enough.”

Found myself talking—or trying to talk—to a pair of uniformed policemen who had come to ask questions about the beating I’d taken. One of them had a name tag that said TIPPIT. I tried to tell him he was in danger. I tried to tell him to remember the fifth of November. It was the right month but the wrong day. I couldn’t remember the actual date and began to thump at my stupid head in frustration. The cops looked at each other, puzzled. NOT-TIPPIT called for a nurse. The nurse came with a doctor, the doctor gave me a shot, and I floated away.

Found myself listening to Sadie as she read to me, first Jude the Obscure, then Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I knew those stories, and listening to them again was comforting. At one point during Tess, I remembered something.

“I made Tessica Caltrop leave us alone.”

Sadie looked up. “Do you mean Jessica? Jessica Caltrop? You did? How? Do you remember?”

But I didn’t. It was gone.

Found myself looking at Sadie as she stood at my little window, staring out at the rain and crying.

But mostly I was lost.

THE MAN WITH THE COWBOY HAT was Deke, but once I thought he was my grandfather, and that scared me very badly, because Grampy Epping was dead, and—

Epping, that was my name. Hold onto it, I told myself, but at first I couldn’t.

Several times AN ELDERLY WOMAN WITH RED LIPSTICK came to see me. Sometimes I thought her name was Miz Mimi; sometimes I thought it was Miz Ellie; once I was quite sure she was Irene Ryan, who played Granny Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. I told her that I’d thrown my cell phone into a pond. “Now it sleeps with the fishes. I sure wish I had that sucker back.”

A YOUNG COUPLE came. Sadie said, “Look, it’s Mike and Bobbi Jill.”

I said, “Mike Coleslaw.”

THE YOUNG MAN said, “That’s close, Mr. A.” He smiled. A tear ran down his cheek when he did.

Later, when Sadie and Deke came to Eden Fallows, they would sit with me on the couch. Sadie would take my hand and ask, “What’s his name, Jake? You never told me his name. How can we stop him if we don’t know who he is or where he is going to be?”

I said, “I’m going to flop him.” I tried very hard. It made the back of my head hurt, but I tried even harder. “Stop him.”

“You couldn’t stop a cinchbug without our help,” Deke said.

But Sadie was too dear and Deke was too old. She shouldn’t have told him in the first place. Maybe that was all right, though, because he didn’t really believe it.

“The Yellow Card Man will stop you if you get involved,” I said. “I’m the only one he can’t stop.”

“Who is the Yellow Card Man?” Sadie asked, leaning forward and taking my hands.

“I don’t remember, but he can’t stop me because I don’t belong here.”

Only he was stopping me. Or something was. Dr. Perry said my amnesia was shallow and transient, and he was right… but only up to a point. If I tried too hard to remember the things that mattered most, my head ached fiercely, my limping walk became a stumble, and my vision blurred. Worst of all was the tendency to suddenly fall asleep. Sadie asked Dr. Perry if it was narcolepsy. He said probably not, but I thought he looked worried.

“Does he wake when you call him or shake him?”

“Always,” Sadie said.

“Is it more likely to happen when he’s upset because he can’t remember something?”

Sadie agreed that it was.

“Then I’m quite sure it will pass, the way his amnesia is passing.”

At last—little by slowly—my inside world began to merge with the outside one. I was Jacob Epping, I was a teacher, and I had somehow traveled back in time to stop the assassination of President Kennedy. I tried to reject the idea at first, but I knew too much about the intervening years, and those things weren’t visions. They were memories. The Rolling Stones, the Clinton impeachment hearings, the World Trade Center in flames. Christy, my troubled and troublesome ex-wife.

One night while Sadie and I were watching Combat, I remembered what I had done to Frank Dunning.

“Sadie, I killed a man before I came to Texas. It was in a graveyard. I had to. He was going to murder his whole family.”

She looked at me, eyes wide and mouth open.

“Turn off the TV,” I said. “The guy who plays Sergeant Saunders—can’t remember his name—is going to be decapitated by a helicopter blade. Please, Sadie, turn it off.”

She did, then knelt before me.

“Who’s going to kill Kennedy? Where is he going to be when he does it?”

I tried my hardest, and I didn’t fall asleep, but I couldn’t remember. I had gone from Maine to Florida, I remembered that. In the Ford Sunliner, a great car. I had gone from Florida to New Orleans, and when I left New Orleans, I’d come to Texas. I remembered listening to “Earth Angel” on the radio as I crossed the state line, doing seventy miles per hour on Highway 20. I remembered a sign: TEXAS WELCOMES YOU. And a billboard advertising SONNY’S B-B-Q, 27 MI. After that, a hole in the film. On the other side were emerging memories of teaching and living in Jodie. Brighter memories of swing-dancing with Sadie and lying in bed with her at the Candlewood Bungalows. Sadie told me I’d also lived in Fort Worth and Dallas, but she didn’t know where; all she had were two phone numbers that no longer worked. I didn’t know where, either, although I thought one of the places might have been on Cadillac Street. She checked roadmaps and said there was no Cadillac Street in either city.

I could remember a lot of things now, but not the assassin’s name, or where he was going to be when he made his try. And why not? Because the past was keeping it from me. The obdurate past.

“The assassin has a child,” I said. “I think her name is April.”

“Jake, I’m going to ask you something. It might make you mad, but since a lot depends on this—the fate of the world, according to you—I need to.”

“Go ahead.” I couldn’t think of anything she might ask that would make me angry.

“Are you lying to me?”

“No,” I said. It was true. Then.

“I told Deke we needed to call the police. He showed me a piece in the Morning News that said there have already been two hundred death threats and tips about potential assassins. He says both the right-wingers from Dallas—Fort Worth and the left-wingers from San Antonio are trying to scare Kennedy out of Texas. He says the Dallas police are turning all the threats and tips over to the FBI and they’re doing nothing. He says the only person J. Edgar Hoover hates more than JFK is his brother Bobby.”

I didn’t much care who J. Edgar Hoover hated. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” she said, and sighed. “Is Vic Morrow really going to die?”

That was his name, sure. “He is.”

“Making Combat?”

“No, a movie.”

She burst into tears. “Don’t you die, Jake—please. I only want you to get better.”

I had a lot of bad dreams. The locations varied—sometimes it was an empty street that looked like Main Street in Lisbon Falls, sometimes it was the graveyard where I’d shot Frank Dunning, sometimes it was the kitchen of Andy Cullum, the cribbage ace—but usually it was Al Templeton’s diner. We sat in a booth with the photos on his Town Wall of Celebrity looking down at us. Al was sick—dying—but his eyes were full of bright intensity.

“The Yellow Card Man’s the personification of the obdurate past,” Al said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Yes, I knew that.

“He thought you’d die from the beating, but you didn’t. He thought you’d die of the infections, but you didn’t. Now he’s walling off those memories—the vital ones—because he knows it’s his last hope of stopping you.”

“How can he? He’s dead.”

Al shook his head. “No, that’s me.”

“Who is he? What is he? And how can he come back to life? He cut his own throat and the card turned black! I saw it!”

“Dunno, buddy. All I know is that he can’t stop you if you refuse to stop. You have to get at those memories.”

“Help me, then!” I shouted, and grabbed the hard claw of his hand. “Tell me the guy’s name! Is it Chapman? Manson? Both of those ring a bell, but neither one seems right. You got me into this, so help me!”

At that point in the dream Al opens his mouth to do just that, but the Yellow Card Man intervenes. If we’re on Main Street, he comes out of the greenfront or the Kennebec Fruit. If it’s the cemetery, he rises from an open grave like a George Romero zombie. If in the diner, the door bursts open. The card he wears in the hatband of his fedora is so black it looks like a rectangular hole in the world. He’s dead and decomposing. His ancient overcoat is splotched with mold. His eye-sockets are writhing balls of worms.

“He can’t tell you nothing because it’s double-money day!” the Yellow Card Man who is now the Black Card Man screams.

I turn back to Al, only Al has become a skeleton with a cigarette clamped in its teeth, and I wake up, sweating. I reach for the memories but the memories aren’t there.

Deke brought me the newspaper stories about the impending Kennedy visit, hoping they would jog something loose. They didn’t. Once, while I was lying on the couch (I was just coming out of one of my sudden sleeps), I heard the two of them arguing yet again about calling the police. Deke said an anonymous tip would be disregarded and one that came with a name attached would get all of us in trouble.

“I don’t care!” Sadie shouted. “I know you think he’s nuts, but what if he’s right? How are you going to feel if Kennedy goes back to Washington from Dallas in a box?”

“If you bring the police in, they’ll focus on Jake, sweetie. And according to you, he killed a man up in New England before he came here.”

Sadie, Sadie, I wish you hadn’t told him that.

She stopped arguing, but she didn’t give up. Sometimes she tried to surprise it out of me, the way you can supposedly surprise someone out of the hiccups. It didn’t work.

“What am I going to do with you?” she asked sadly.

“I don’t know.”

“Try to come at it some other way. Try to sneak up on it.”

“I have. I think the guy was in the Army or the Marines.” I rubbed at the back of my head, where the ache was starting again. “But it might have been the Navy. Shit, Christy, I don’t know.”

“Sadie, Jake. I’m Sadie.”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

She shook her head and tried to smile.

On the twelfth, the Tuesday after Veterans Day, the Morning News ran a long editorial about the impending Kennedy visit and what it meant for the city. “Most residents seem ready to welcome the young and inexperienced president with open arms,” the piece said. “Excitement is running high. Of course it doesn’t hurt that his pretty and charismatic wife will be along for the ride.”

“More dreams about the Yellow Card Man last night?” Sadie asked when she came in. She’d spent the holiday in Jodie, mostly to water her houseplants and to “show the flag,” as she put it.

I shook my head. “Honey, you’ve been here a lot more than you’ve been in Jodie. What’s the status of your job?”

“Miz Ellie put me on part-time. I’m getting by, and when I go with you… if we go… I guess I’ll just have to see what happens.”

Her gaze shifted away from me and she busied herself lighting a cigarette. Watching her take too long tamping it on the coffee table and then fiddling with her matches, I realized a dispiriting thing: Sadie was also having her doubts. I’d predicted a peaceful end to the Missile Crisis, I had known Dick Tiger was going down in the fifth… but she still had her doubts. And I didn’t blame her. If our positions had been reversed, I would have been having mine.

Then she brightened. “But I’ve got a heck of a good stand-in, and I bet you can guess who.”

I smiled. “Is it…” I couldn’t get the name. I could see him—the weathered, suntanned face, the cowboy hat, the string tie—but that Tuesday morning I couldn’t even get close. My head started to ache in the back, where it had hit the baseboard—but what baseboard, in what house? It was so abysmally fucked up not to know.

Kennedy’s coming in ten days and I can’t even remember that old guy’s fucking name.

“Try, Jake.”

“I am,” I said. “I am, Sadie!”

“Wait a sec. I’ve got an idea.”

She laid her smoldering cigarette in one of the ashtray grooves, got up, went out the front door, closed it behind her. Then she opened it and spoke in a voice that was comically gruff and deep, saying what the old guy said each time he came to visit: “How you doin today, son? Takin any nourishment?”

“Deke,” I said. “Deke Simmons. He was married to Miz Mimi, but she died in Mexico. We had a memorial assembly for her.”

The headache was gone. Just like that.

Sadie clapped her hands and ran to me. I got a long and lovely kiss.

“See?” she said when she drew back. “You can do this. It’s still not too late. What’s his name, Jake? What’s the crazy bugger’s name?”

But I couldn’t remember.

On November sixteenth, the Times Herald published the Kennedy motorcade route. It would start at Love Field and end at the Trade Mart, where he would speak to the Dallas Citizens Council and their invited guests. The nominal purpose of his speech was to salute the Graduate Research Center and congratulate Dallas on its economic progress over the last decade, but the Times Herald was happy to inform those who didn’t already know that the real reason was pure politics. Texas had gone for Kennedy in 1960, but ’64 was looking shaky in spite of having a good old Johnson City boy on the ticket. Cynics still called the vice president “Landslide Lyndon,” a reference to his 1948 Senate bid, a decidedly hinky affair he won by eighty-seven votes. That was ancient history, but the nickname’s longevity said a lot about the mixed feelings Texans had about him. Kennedy’s job—and Jackie’s, of course—was to help Landslide Lyndon and Texas governor John Connally fire up the faithful.

“Look at this,” Sadie said, tracing a fingertip along the route. “Blocks and blocks of Main Street. Then Houston Street. There are high buildings all along that part. Is the man going to be on Main Street? He just about has to be, don’t you think?”

I hardly listened, because I’d seen something else. “Look, Sadie, the motorcade’s going to go along Turtle Creek Boulevard!”

Her eyes blazed. “Is that where it’s going to happen?”

I shook my head doubtfully. Probably not, but I knew something about Turtle Creek Boulevard, and it had to do with the man I’d come to stop. As I considered this, something floated to the surface.

“He was going to hide the rifle and come back for it later.”

“Hide it where?”

“It doesn’t matter, because that part already happened. That part’s the past.” I put my hands over my face because the light in the room was suddenly too bright.

“Stop thinking about it now,” she said, and snatched the newspaper story away. “Relax, or you’ll get one of your headaches and need one of those pills. They make you all sloppy.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

“You need coffee. Strong coffee.”

She went into the kitchen to make it. When she came back, I was snoring. I slept for almost three hours, and might have remained in the Land of Nod even longer, but she shook me awake. “What’s the last thing you remember about coming to Dallas?”

“I don’t remember it.”

“Where did you stay? A hotel? A motor court? A rented room?”

For a moment I had a hazy memory of a courtyard and many windows. A doorman? Maybe. Then it was gone. The headache was cranking up again.