11/22/63 Кинг Стивен

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.”

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.

“I am, and I’m not.” And before she can pursue it: “May I ask what sparked your interest in public service?”

Her smile is now just a lingering ghost around the corners of her mouth. “And you want to know because—?”

“Was it the assassination? The Kennedy assassination?”

“Why… I guess it was, in a way. I like to think I would have gotten involved in the wider world anyway, but I suppose it started there. It left this part of Texas with…” Her left hand rises involuntarily toward her cheek, then drops again. “… such a scar. Mr. Amberson, where do I know you from? Because I do know you, I’m sure of it.”

“Can I ask another question?”

She looks at me with mounting perplexity. I glance at my watch. Eight-fourteen. Almost time. Unless Donald forgets, of course… and I don’t think he will. To quote some old fifties song or other, some things are just meant to be.

“The Sadie Hawkins dance, back in 1961. Who did you get to chaperone with you when Coach Borman’s mother broke her hip? Do you recall?”

Her mouth drops open, then slowly closes. The mayor and his wife approach, see us in deep conversation, and veer off. We are in our own little capsule here; just Jake and Sadie. The way it was once upon a time.

“Don Haggarty,” she says. “It was like shapping a dance with the village idiot. Mr. Amberson—”

But before she can finish, Donald Bellingham comes in through eight tall loudspeakers, right on cue: “Okay, Jodie, here’s a blast from the past, a platter that really matters, only the best and by request!”

Then it comes, that smooth brass intro from a long-gone band:

Bah-dah-dah… bah-dah-da-dee-dum…

“Oh my God, ‘In the Mood,’” Sadie says. “I used to lindy to this one.”

I hold out my hand. “Come on. Let’s do the thing.”

She laughs, shaking her head. “My swing-dancing days are far behind me, I’m afraid, Mr. Amberson.”

“But you’re not too old to waltz. As Donald used to say in the old days, ‘Out of your seats and on your feets.’ And call me George. Please.”

In the street, couples are jitterbugging. A few of them are even trying to lindy-hop, but none of them can swing it the way Sadie and I could swing it, back in the day. Not even close.

She takes my hand like a woman in a dream. She is in a dream, and so am I. Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief… but brevity makes sweetness, doesn’t it? Yes, I think so. Because when the time is gone, you can never get it back.

Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone’s chair, but I’m ready for this and catch her easily by the arm.

“Sorry, clumsy,” she says.

“You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits.”

Before she can ask about that, I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for me the years fall away like a coat that’s too heavy and too tight. In that moment I hope one thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at least one good man, one who disposed of John Clayton’s fucking broom once and for all.

She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music, but I hear her—I always did. “Who are you, George?”

“Someone you knew in another life, honey.”

Then the music takes us, the music rolls away the years, and we dance.

January 2, 2009—December 18, 2010

Sarasota, Florida

Lovell, Maine

Afterword

Almost half a century has passed since John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, but two questions linger: Was Lee Oswald really the trigger-man, and if so, did he act alone? Nothing I’ve written in 11/22/63 will provide answers to those questions, because time-travel is just an interesting make-believe. But if you, like me, are curious about why those questions still remain, I think I can give you a satisfactory two-word response: Karen Carlin. Not just a footnote to history, but a footnote to a footnote. And yet…

Jack Ruby owned a Dallas strip joint called the Carousel Club. Carlin, whose nom du burlesque was Little Lynn, danced there. On the night following the assassination, Ruby received a call from Miss Carlin, who was twenty-five dollars short on the December rent and desperately needed a loan to keep from being turned out into the street. Would he help?

Jack Ruby, who had other things on his mind, gave her the rough side of his tongue (in truth, it was the only side Dallas’s Sparky Jack seemed to have). He was appalled that the president he revered had been killed in his home city, and he spoke repeatedly to friends and relatives about how terrible this was for Mrs. Kennedy and her children. Ruby was heartsick at the thought of Jackie having to return to Dallas for Oswald’s trial. The widow would become a national spectacle, he said. Her grief would be used to sell tabloids.

Unless, of course, Lee Oswald came down with a bad case of the deads.

Everybody at the Dallas Police Department had at least a nodding acquaintance with Jack. He and his “wife”—that was what he called his little dachsund, Sheba—were frequent visitors at DPD. He handed out free passes to his clubs, and when cops showed up there, he bought them free drinks. So no one took any particular notice of him when he turned up at the station on Saturday, November twenty-third. When Oswald was paraded before the press, proclaiming his innocence and displaying a black eye, Ruby was there. He had a gun (yes, another .38, this one a Colt Cobra), and he fully intended to shoot Oswald with it. But the room was crowded; Ruby was shunted to the back; then Oswald was gone.

So Jack Ruby gave up.

Late Sunday morning, he went to the Western Union office a block or so from the DPD and sent “Little Lynn” a money order for twenty-five dollars. Then he wandered down to the cop-shop. He assumed that Oswald had already been transferred to the Dallas County Jail, and was surprised to see a crowd gathered in front of the police station. There were reporters, news vans, and your ordinary gawkers. The transfer hadn’t occurred on schedule.

Ruby had his gun, and Ruby wormed his way into the police garage. No problem there. Some of the cops even said hi, and Ruby hi’d them right back. Oswald was still upstairs. At the last moment he had asked his jailers if he could put on a sweater, because his shirt had a hole in it. The detour to get the sweater took less than three minutes, but that was just enough—life turns on a dime. Ruby shot Oswald in the abdomen. As a pig-pile of cops landed on top of Sparky Jack, he managed to yell: “Hey, guys, I’m Jack Ruby! You all know me!”

The assassin died at Parkland Hospital shortly thereafter, without making a statement. Thanks to a stripper who needed twenty-five bucks and a half-assed showboat who wanted to put on a sweater, Oswald was never tried for his crime, and never had a real chance to confess. His final statement on his part in the events of 11/22/63 was “I’m a patsy.” The resulting arguments over whether or not he was telling the truth have never stopped.

Early in the novel, Jake Epping’s friend Al puts the probability that Oswald was the lone gunman at ninety-five percent. After reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am, I’d put the probability at ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine. Because all of the accounts, including those written by conspiracy theorists, tell the same simple American story: here was a dangerous little fame-junkie who found himself in just the right place to get lucky. Were the odds of it happening just the way it did long? Yes. So are the odds on winning the lottery, but someone wins one every day.

Probably the most useful source-materials I read in preparation for writing this novel were Case Closed, by Gerald Posner; Legend, by Edward Jay Epstein (nutty Robert Ludlum stuff, but fun); Oswald’s Tale, by Norman Mailer; and Mrs. Paine’s Garage, by Thomas Mallon. The latter offers a brilliant analysis of the conspiracy theorists and their need to find order in what was almost a random event. The Mailer is also remarkable. He says that he went into the project (which includes extensive interviews with Russians who knew Lee and Marina in Minsk) believing that Oswald was the victim of a conspiracy, but in the end came to believe—reluctantly—that the stodgy ole Warren Commission was right: Oswald acted alone.

It is very, very difficult for a reasonable person to believe otherwise. Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

I was also deeply impressed—and moved, and shaken—by my rereading of William Manchester’s Death of a President. He’s dead wrong about some things, he’s given to flights of purple prose (calling Marina Oswald “lynx-eyed,” for instance), his analysis of Oswald’s motives is both superficial and hostile, but this massive work, published only four years after that terrible lunch hour in Dallas, is closest in time to the assassination, written when most of the participants were still alive and their recollections were still vivid. Armed with Jacqueline Kennedy’s conditional approval of the project, everyone talked to Manchester, and although his account of the aftermath is turgid, his narrative of 11/22’s events is chilling and vivid, a Zapruder film in words.

Well… almost everyone talked to him. Marina Oswald did not, and Manchester’s consequent harsh treatment of her may have something to do with that. Marina (still alive at this writing) had her eye on the main chance in the aftermath of her husband’s cowardly act, and who could blame her? Those who want to read her full recollections can find them in Marina and Lee, by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. I trust very little of what she says (unless corroborated by other sources), but I salute—with some reluctance, it’s true—her survival skills.

I originally tried to write this book way back in 1972. I dropped the project because the research it would involve seemed far too daunting for a man who was teaching full-time. There was another reason: even nine years after the deed, the wound was still too fresh. I’m glad I waited. When I finally decided to go ahead, it was natural for me to turn to my old friend Russ Dorr for help with the research. He provided a splendid support system for another long book, Under the Dome, and once more rose to the occasion. I am writing this afterword surrounded by heaps of research materials, the most valuable of which are the videos Russ shot during our exhaustive (and exhausting) travels in Dallas, and the foot-high stack of emails that came in response to my questions about everything from the 1958 World Series to mid-century bugging devices. It was Russ who located the home of Edwin Walker, which just happened to be on the 11/22 motorcade route (the past harmonizes), and it was Russ who—after much searching of various Dallas records—found the probable 1963 address of that most peculiar man, George de Mohrenschildt. And by the way, just where was Mr. de Mohrenschildt on the night of April 10, 1963? Probably not at the Carousel Club, but if he had an alibi for the attempted assassination of the general, I wasn’t able to find it.

I hate to bore you with my Academy Awards speech—I get very annoyed with writers who do that—but I need to tip my cap to some other people, all the same. Big Number One is Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. He answered billions of questions, sometimes twice or three times before I got the info crammed into my dumb head. The tour of the Texas School Book Depository was a grim necessity that he lightened with his considerable wit and encyclopedic knowledge.

Thanks are also due to Nicola Longford, the Executive Director of The Sixth Floor Museum, and Megan Bryant, Director of Collections and Intellectual Property. Brian Collins and Rachel Howell work in the History Department of the Dallas Public Library and gave me access to old films (some of them pretty hilarious) that show how the city looked in the years 1960–63. Susan Richards, a researcher at the Dallas Historical Society, also pitched in, as did Amy Brumfield, David Reynolds, and the staff of the Adolphus Hotel. Longtime Dallas resident Martin Nobles drove Russ and me around Dallas. He took us to the now-closed but still standing Texas Theatre, where Oswald was captured, to the former residence of Edwin Walker, to Greenville Avenue (not as gruesome as Fort Worth’s bar-and-whore district once was), and to Mercedes Street, where 2703 no longer exists. It did indeed blow away in a tornado… although not in 1963. And a tip of the cap to Mike “Silent Mike” McEachern, who donated his name for charitable purposes.

I want to thank Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, former Kennedy aide-de-camp Dick Goodwin, for indulging my questions about worst-case scenarios, had Kennedy lived. George Wallace as the thirty-seventh president was their idea… but the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. My son, the novelist Joe Hill, pointed out several consequences of time-travel I hadn’t considered. He also thought up a new and better ending. Joe, you rock.

And I want to thank my wife, my first reader of choice and hardest, fairest critic. An ardent Kennedy supporter, she saw him in person not long before his death, and has never forgotten it. A contrarian her whole life, Tabitha is (it does not surprise me and should not surprise you) on the side of the conspiracy theorists.

Have I gotten things wrong here? You bet. Have I changed things to suit the course of my story? Sure. As one example, it’s true that Lee and Marina went to a welcome party thrown by George Bouhe and attended by most of the area’s Russian migrs, and it’s true that Lee hated and resented those middle-class burghers who had turned their back on Mother Russia, but the party happened three weeks later than it does in my book. And while it’s true that Lee, Marina, and baby June lived upstairs at 214 West Neely Street, I have no idea who—if anybody—lived in the downstairs apartment. But that was the one I toured (paying twenty bucks for the privilege), and it seemed a shame not to use the layout of the place. And what a desperate little place it was.

Mostly, however, I stuck to the truth.

Some people will protest that I have been excessively hard on the city of Dallas. I beg to differ. If anything, Jake Epping’s first-person narrative allowed me to be too easy on it, at least as it was in 1963. On the day Kennedy landed at Love Field, Dallas was a hateful place. Confederate flags flew rightside up; American flags flew upside down. Some airport spectators held up signs reading HELP JFK STAMP OUT DEMOCRACY. Not long before that day in November, both Adlai Stevenson and Lady Bird Johnson were subjected to spit-showers by Dallas voters. Those spitting on Mrs. Johnson were middle-class housewives.

It’s better today, but one still sees signs on Main Street saying HANDGUNS NOT ALLOWED IN THE BAR. This is an afterword, not an editorial, but I hold strong opinions on this subject, particularly given the current political climate of my country. If you want to know what political extremism can lead to, look at the Zapruder film. Take particular note of frame 313, where Kennedy’s head explodes.

Before I finish, I want to thank one other person: the late Jack Finney, who was one of America’s great fantasists and storytellers. Besides The Body Snatchers, he wrote Time and Again, which is, in this writer’s humble opinion, the great time-travel story. Originally I meant to dedicate this book to him, but in June of las year, a lovely little granddaughter arrived in our family, so Zelda gets the nod.

Jack, I’m sure you’d understand.

Stephen King

Bangor, Maine

Description

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First Scribner hardcover edition November 2011

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011025874

ISBN 978-1-4516-2728-2 (print)

ISBN 978-1-4516-2730-5 (eBook)

Image credits: pages ix, 7, 351 (left), and 575: Getty; page 97: courtesy of the Lisbon Historical Society (special thanks to Russ Dorr for research); pages 223 and 749: Corbis; page 351 (right): courtesy of Steven Meyers and Bob Rowen.

Lyrics from the song “Honky Tonk Women” are used with permission. Words and Music by MICK JAGGER and KEITH RICHARDS © 1969 (Renewed) ABKCO MUSIC, INC., 85 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC PUBLISHING CO., INC.