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Only it wasn’t. There was nothing but the pavement under my testing, tapping shoe.
I went a little farther, and there was still nothing. It was cold enough to see a thin vapor when I exhaled, but a light, greasy sweat had broken out on my arms and neck. I went a little farther, but was now almost sure I had gone too far. Either the rabbit-hole was gone or it had never been there in the first place, which meant that my whole life as Jake Epping—everything from my prize-winning FFA garden in grammar school to my abandoned novel in college to my marriage to a basically sweet woman who’d almost drowned my love for her in alcohol—had been a crazy hallucination. I’d been George Amberson all along.
I went a little farther, then stopped, breathing hard. Somewhere—maybe in the dyehouse, maybe in one of the weaving rooms—someone shouted “Fuck me sideways!” I jumped, then jumped again at the bull roar of laughter that followed the exclamation.
Not here.
Gone.
Or never was.
And did I feel disappointment? Terror? Outright panic? None of those, actually. What I felt was a sneaking sense of relief. What I thought was, I could live here. And quite easily. Happily, even.
Was that true? Yes. Yes.
It stank near the mills and on public conveyances where everybody smoked their heads off, but in most places the air smelled incredibly sweet. Incredibly new. Food tasted good; milk was delivered directly to your door. After a period of withdrawal from my computer, I’d gained enough perspective to realize just how addicted to that fucking thing I’d become, spending hours reading stupid email attachments and visiting websites for the same reason mountaineers wanted to climb Everest: because they were there. My cell phone never rang because I had no cell phone, and what a relief that had been. Outside of the big cities, most folks were still on party lines, and did the majority lock their doors at night? Balls they did. They worried about nuclear war, but I was safe in the knowledge that the people of 1958 would grow old and die without ever hearing of an A-bomb being exploded in anything but a test. No one worried about global warming or suicide bombers flying hijacked jets into skyscrapers.
And if my 2011 life wasn’t a hallucination (in my heart I knew this), I could still stop Oswald. I just wouldn’t know the ultimate result. I thought I could live with that.
Okay. The first thing to do was to return to the Sunliner and get out of Lisbon Falls. I’d drive to Lewiston, find the bus station, and buy a ticket to New York. I’d take a train to Dallas from there… or hell, why not fly? I still had plenty of cash, and no airline clerk was going to demand a picture ID. All I had to do was fork over the price of a ticket and Trans World Airlines would welcome me aboard.
The relief of this decision was so great that my legs again went rubbery. The weakness wasn’t as bad as it had been in Derry, when I’d had to sit down, but I leaned against the drying shed for support. My elbow struck it, making a soft bong sound. And a voice spoke to me out of thin air. Hoarse. Almost a growl. A voice from the future, as it were.
“Jake? Is that you?” This was followed by a fusillade of dry, barking coughs.
I almost kept silent. I could have kept silent. Then I thought of how much of his life Al had invested in this project, and how I was now the only thing he had left to hope for.
I turned toward the sound of those coughs and spoke in a low voice. “Al? Talk to me. Count off.” I could have added, Or just keep coughing.
He began to count. I went toward the sound of the numbers, feeling with my foot. After ten steps—far beyond the place where I had given up—the toe of my shoe simultaneously took a step forward and struck something that stopped it cold. I took one more look around. Took one more breath of the chemical-stenchy air. Then I closed my eyes and started climbing steps I couldn’t see. On the fourth one, the chilly night air was replaced with stuffy warmth and the smells of coffee and spices. At least that was the case with my top half. Below the waist, I could still feel the night.
I stood there for maybe three seconds, half in the present and half in the past. Then I opened my eyes, saw Al’s haggard, anxious, too-thin face, and stepped back into 2011.
PART 3
Living in the Past
CHAPTER 9
1
I would have said I was beyond surprise by then, but what I saw just to Al’s left dropped my jaw: a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray. I reached past him and stubbed it out. “Do you want to cough up whatever working lung tissue you’ve got left?”
He didn’t respond to that. I’m not sure he even heard it. He was staring at me, wide-eyed. “Jesus God, Jake—who scalped you?”
“No one. Let’s get out of here before I strangle on your secondhand smoke.” But that was empty scolding. During the weeks I’d spent in Derry, I’d gotten used to the smell of burning cigarettes. Soon I’d be picking up the habit myself, if I didn’t watch out.
“You are scalped,” he said. “You just don’t know it. There’s a piece of your hair hanging down behind your ear, and… how much did you bleed, anyway? A quart? And who did it to you?”
“A, less than a quart. B, Frank Dunning. If that takes care of your questions, now I’ve got one. You said you were going to pray. Why were you smoking instead?”
“Because I was nervous. And because it doesn’t matter now. The horse is out of the barn.”
I could hardly argue on that score.
2
Al made his way slowly behind the counter, where he opened a cabinet and took out a plastic box with a red cross on it. I sat on one of the stools and looked at the clock. It had been quarter to eight when Al unlocked the door and led us into the diner. Probably five of when I went down the rabbit-hole and emerged in Wonderland circa 1958. Al claimed every trip took exactly two minutes, and the clock on the wall seemed to bear that out. I’d spent fifty-two days in 1958, but here it was 7:59 in the morning.
Al was assembling gauze, tape, disinfectant. “Bend down here so I can see it,” he said. “Put your chin right on the counter.”
“You can skip the hydrogen peroxide. It happened four hours ago, and it’s clotted. See?”
“Better safe than sorry,” he said, then set the top of my head on fire.
“Ahhh!”
“Hurts, don’t it? Because it’s still open. You want some 1958 sawbones treating you for an infected scalp before you head down to Big D? Believe me, buddy, you don’t. Hold still. I have to snip some hair or the tape won’t hold. Thank God you kept it short.”
Clip-clip-clip. Then he added to the pain—insult to injury, as they say—by pressing gauze to the laceration and taping it down.
“You can take the gauze off in a day or two, but you’ll want to keep your hat over it until then. Gonna look a little mangy up top there for awhile, but if the hair doesn’t grow back, you can always comb it over. Want some aspirin?”
“Yes. And a cup of coffee. Can you rustle that?” Although coffee would only help for a little while. What I needed was sleep.
“I can.” He flicked the switch on the Bunn-o-Matic, then began rummaging in the first aid kit again. “You look like you’ve lost some weight.”
You should talk, I thought. “I’ve been sick. Caught a twenty-four-hour—” That was where I stopped.
“Jake, what’s wrong?”
I was looking at Al’s framed photographs. When I’d gone down the rabbit-hole, there had been a picture of Harry Dunning and me up there. We were smiling and holding up Harry’s GED diploma for the camera.
It was gone.
3
“Jake? Buddy? What is it?”
I took the aspirin he’d put on the counter, stuck them in my mouth, dry-swallowed. Then I got up and walked slowly over to the Wall of Celebrity. I felt like a man made of glass. Where the picture of Harry and me had hung for the last two years, there was now one of Al shaking hands with Mike Michaud, the U.S. Representative from Maine’s Second District. Michaud must have been running for re-election, because Al was wearing two buttons on his cook’s apron. One said MICHAUD FOR CONGRESS. The other said LISBON LUVS MIKE. The honorable Representative was wearing a bright orange Moxie tee-shirt and holding up a dripping Fatburger for the camera.
I lifted the photo from its hook. “How long has this been here?”
He looked at it, frowning. “I’ve never seen that picture in my life. God knows I supported Michaud in his last two runs—hell, I support any Democrat who ain’t been caught screwing his campaign aides—and I met him at a rally in double-oh-eight, but that was in Castle Rock. He’s never been in the diner.”
“Apparently he has been. That’s your counter, isn’t it?”
He took the picture in hands now so scrawny they were little more than talons, and held it close to his face. “Yuh,” he said. “It sure is.”
“So there is a butterfly effect. This photo’s proof.”
He looked at it fixedly, smiling a little. In wonder, I think. Or maybe awe. Then he handed it back to me and went behind the counter to pour the coffee.
“Al? You still remember Harry, don’t you? Harry Dunning?”
“Of course I do. Isn’t he why you went to Derry and almost got your head knocked off?”
“For him and the rest of his family, yes.”
“And did you save them?”
“All but one. His father got Tugga before we could stop him.”
“Who’s we?”
“I’ll tell you everything, but first I’m going home to bed.”
“Buddy, we don’t have a whole lot of time.”
“I know that,” I said, thinking All I have to do is look at you, Al. “But I’m dead for sleep. For me, it’s one-thirty in the morning, and I’ve had…”—my mouth opened in a huge yawn—“… had quite a night.”
“All right.” He brought coffee—a full cup for me, black, half a cup for him, liberally dosed with cream. “Tell me what you can while you drink this.”
“First, explain to me how you can remember Harry if he was never a janitor at LHS and never bought a Fatburger from you in his whole life. Second, explain to me why you don’t remember Mike Michaud visiting the diner when that picture says he did.”
“You don’t know for a fact that Harry Dunning’s not still in town,” Al said. “In fact, you don’t know for sure he’s not still janitoring at Lisbon High.”
“It’d be a hell of a coincidence if he was. I changed the past big-time, Al—with some help from a guy named Bill Turcotte. Harry wouldn’t have gone to live with his aunt and uncle in Haven, because his mother didn’t die. Neither did his brother Troy or his sister, Ellen. And Dunning never got near Harry himself with that hammer of his. If Harry still lives in The Falls after all those changes, I’d be the most surprised guy on earth.”
“There’s a way to check,” Al said. “I’ve got a laptop computer in my office. Come on back.” He led the way, coughing and holding onto things. I carried my cup of coffee with me; he left his behind.
Office was far too grand a name for the closet-sized cubbyhole off the kitchen. It was hardly big enough for both of us. The walls were papered with memos, permits, and health directives from both the state of Maine and the feds. If the people who passed on rumors and gossip about the Famous Catburger had seen all that paperwork—which included a Class A Certification of Cleanliness following the last inspection by the State of Maine Restaurant Commission—they might have been forced to rethink their position.
Harry’s MacBook sat on the sort of desk I remember using in the third grade. He collapsed into a chair of about the same size with a grunt of pain and relief. “High school’s got a website, doesn’t it?”
“Sure.”
While we waited for the laptop to boot, I wondered how many emails had piled up during my fifty-two-day absence. Then I remembered I’d actually been gone only two minutes. Silly me. “I think I’m losing it, Al,” I said.
“I know the feeling. Just hang on, buddy, you’ll—wait, here we go. Let’s see. Courses… summer schedule… faculty… administration… custodial staff.”
“Hit it,” I said.
He massaged the touch pad, muttered, nodded, clicked on something, then stared into the computer screen like a swami consulting his crystal ball.
“Well? Don’t keep me hanging.”
He turned the laptop so I could look. LHS CUSTODIAL STAFF, it said. THE BEST IN MAINE! There was a photograph of two men and a woman standing at center court in the gymnasium. They were all smiling. They were all wearing Lisbon Greyhounds sweatshirts. None of them was Harry Dunning.
4
“You remember him in his life as a janitor and as your student because you’re the one who went down the rabbit-hole,” Al said. We were back in the diner again, sitting in one of the booths. “I remember him either because I’ve used the rabbit-hole myself or just because I’m near it.” He considered. “That’s probably it. A kind of radiation. The Yellow Card Man’s also near it, only on the other side, and he feels it, too. You’ve seen him, so you know.”
“He’s the Orange Card Man now.”
“What are you talking about?”
I yawned again. “If I tried to tell you now, I’d make a total mess of everything. I want to drive you home, then go home myself. I’m going to get something to eat, because I’m hungry as a bear—”
“I’ll scramble you up some eggs,” he said. He started to rise, then sat back down with a thump and began to cough. Each inhale was a hacking wheeze that shook his whole body. Something rattled in his throat like a playing card in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
I put my hand on his arm. “What you’ll do is go back home, take some dope, and rest. Sleep if you can. I know I can. Eight hours. I’ll set the alarm.”
He stopped coughing, but I could still hear that playing card rattling in his throat. “Sleep. The good kind. I remember that. I envy you, buddy.”
“I’ll be back at your place by seven tonight. No, let’s say eight. That’ll give me a chance to check a few things on the internet.”
“And if everything looks jake?” He smiled faintly at this pun… which I, of course, had heard at least a thousand times.
“Then I’ll go back again tomorrow and get ready to do the deed.”
“No,” he said. “You’re going to undo the deed.” He squeezed my hand. His fingers were thin, but there was still strength in his grip. “That’s what this is all about. Finding Oswald, undoing his fuckery, and wiping that self-satisfied smirk off his face.”
5
When I started my car, the first thing I did was reach for the stubby Ford gearshift on the column and punch for the springy Ford clutch with my left foot. When my fingers closed around nothing but air and my shoe thumped on nothing but floormat, I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“What?” Al asked from his place in the shotgun seat.
I missed my nifty Ford Sunliner, that was what, but it was okay; soon I’d buy it again. Although since next time I’d be shorter of funds, at least to start with (my deposit at the Hometown Trust would be gone, lost in the next reset), I might dicker a little more with Bill Titus.
I thought I could do that.
I was different now.
“Jake? Something funny?”
“It’s nothing.”
I looked for changes on Main Street, but all the usual buildings were present and accounted for, including the Kennebec Fruit, which looked—as usual—about two unpaid bills away from financial collapse. The statue of Chief Worumbo still stood in the town park, and the banner in the window of Cabell’s Furniture still assured the world that WE WILL NOT BE UNDERSOLD.
“Al, you remember the chain you have to duck under to get back to the rabbit-hole, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“And the sign hanging from it?”
“The one about the sewer pipe.” He was sitting like a soldier who thinks the road ahead may be mined, and every time we went over a bump, he winced.
“When you came back from Dallas—when you realized you were too sick to make it—was that sign still there?”
“Yeah,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “It was. That’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Who takes four years to fix a busted sewer pipe?”
“Nobody. Not in a millyard where trucks are coming and going all day and all night. So why doesn’t it attract attention?”
He shook his head. “No idea.”
“It might be there to keep people from wandering into the rabbit-hole by accident. But, if so, who put it there?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if what you’re saying is right.”
I turned onto his street, hoping I could see him safely inside and then manage the seven or eight miles out to Sabattus without falling asleep behind the wheel. But one other thing was on my mind, and I needed to say it. If only so he wouldn’t get his hopes up too high.
“The past is obdurate, Al. It doesn’t want to be changed.”
“I know. I told you.”
“You did. But what I think now is that the resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”
He looked at me. The patches beneath his eyes were darker than ever, and the eyes themselves shone with pain. “Could you give it to me in English?”
“Changing the Dunning family’s future was harder than changing Carolyn Poulin’s future, partly because there were more people involved, but mostly because the Poulin girl would have lived, either way. Doris Dunning and her kids all would have died… and one of them died anyway, although I intend to remedy that.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Good for you. Just make sure that next time you duck a little more. Save yourself from having to deal with an embarrassing scar where the hair may not grow back.”
I had ideas about that, but didn’t bother saying so. I nosed my car up his driveway. “What I’m saying is that I may not be able to stop Oswald. At least not the first time.” I laughed. “But what the hell, I flunked my driver’s test the first time, too.”
“So did I, but they didn’t make me wait five years to take it again.”
He had a point there.
“What are you, Jake, thirty? Thirty-two?”
“Thirty-five.” And two months closer to thirty-six than I had been earlier this morning, but what was a couple of months between friends?
“If you screwed the pooch and had to start over, you’d be forty-five when the merry-go-round came back to the brass ring the second time. A lot can happen in ten years, especially if the past’s against you.”
“I know,” I said. “Look what happened to you.”
“I got lung cancer from smoking, that’s all.” He coughed as if to prove this, but I saw doubt as well as pain in his eyes.
“Probably that’s all it was. I hope that’s all it was. But it’s one more thing we don’t kn—”
His front door banged open. A large young woman wearing a lime-green smock and white Nancy Nurse shoes came half-running down the driveway. She saw Al slumped in the passenger seat of my Toyota and yanked open the door. “Mr. Templeton, where have you been? I came in to give you your meds, and when I found the house empty, I thought—”
He managed a smile. “I know what you thought, but I’m okay. Not beautiful, but okay.”
She looked at me. “And you. What are you doing driving him around? Can’t you see how fragile he is?”
Of course I could. But since I could hardly tell her what we’d been doing, I kept my mouth shut and prepared to take my scolding like a man.
“We had an important matter to discuss,” Al said. “Okay? Got it?”
“Just the same—”
He opened the car door. “Help me inside, Doris. Jake’s got to get home.”
Doris.
As in Dunning.
He didn’t notice the coincidence—and surely that was what it was, it’s a common enough name—but it clanged in my head just the same.
6
I made it home, and this time it was the Sunliner’s emergency brake I found myself reaching for. As I turned off the engine I thought about what a cramped, niggardly, basically unpleasant plastic-and-fiberglass shitbox my Toyota was compared to the car I’d gotten used to in Derry. I let myself in, started to feed my cat, and saw the food in his dish was still fresh and moist. Why wouldn’t it be? In 2011, it had been in the bowl for only an hour and a half.
“Eat that, Elmore,” I said. “There are cats starving in China who’d love a bowl of Friskies Choice Cuts.”
Elmore gave me the look that one deserved and oiled out through the cat door. I nuked a couple of Stouffer’s frozen dinners (thinking like Frankenstein’s monster learning to talk: microwave good, modern cars bad). I ate everything, disposed of the trash, and went into the bedroom. I took off my plain white 1958 shirt (thanking God Al’s Doris had been too mad to notice the blood-spatters on it), sat on the side of the bed to unlace my sensible 1958 shoes, and then let myself fall backward. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep while I was still in midair.
7
I forgot all about setting the alarm and might have slept long past 5:00 P.M., but Elmore jumped on my chest at quarter past four and began to sniff at my face. That meant he’d cleaned his dish and was requesting a refill. I provided more food for the feline, splashed my face with cold water, then ate a bowl of Special K, thinking it would be days before I could get the proper order of my meals reestablished.
With my belly full, I went into the study and booted up my computer. The town library was my first cyber-stop. Al was right—they had the entire run of the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise in their database. I had to become a Friend of the Library before I could access the goodies, which cost ten dollars, but given the circumstances, that seemed a small price to pay.
The issue of the Enterprise I was looking for was dated November 7. On page 2, sandwiched between an item about a fatal car wreck and one concerning a case of suspected arson, was a story headlined LOCAL POLICE SEEK MYSTERY MAN. The mystery man was me… or rather my Eisenhower-era alter ego. The Sunliner convertible had been found, the bloodstains duly noted. Bill Titus identified the Ford as one he had sold to a Mr. George Amberson. The tone of the article touched my heart: simple concern for a missing (and possibly injured) man’s whereabouts. Gregory Dusen, my Hometown Trust banker, described me as “a well-spoken and polite fellow.” Eddie Baumer, proprietor of Baumer’s Barber Shop, said essentially the same thing. Not a single whiff of suspicion accrued to the Amberson name. Things might have been different if I’d been linked to a certain sensational case in Derry, but I hadn’t been.
Nor was I in the following week’s issue, where I had been reduced to a mere squib in the Police Beat: SEARCH FOR MISSING WISCONSIN MAN CONTINUES. In the issue following that, the Weekly Enterprise had gone gaga for the upcoming holiday season, and George Amberson disappeared from the paper entirely. But I had been there. Al carved his name on a tree. I’d found mine in the pages of an old newspaper. I’d expected it, but looking at the actual proof was still awe-inspiring.
I next went to the Derry Daily News website. It cost me considerably more to access their archives—$34.50—but within a matter of minutes I was looking at the front page of the issue for the first of November, 1958.
You would expect a sensational local crime to headline the front page of a local newspaper, but in Derry—the Peculiar Little City—they kept as quiet as possible about their atrocities. The big story that day had to do with Russia, Great Britain, and the United States meeting in Geneva to discuss a possible nuclear test-ban treaty. Below this was a story about a fourteen-year-old chess prodigy named Bobby Fischer. At the very bottom of the front page, on the lefthand side (where, media experts tell us, people are apt to look last, if at all), was a story headlined MURDEROUS RAMPAGE ENDS IN 2 DEATHS. According to the story, Frank Dunning, “a prominent member of the business community and active in many charity drives,” had arrived at the home of his estranged wife “in a state of inebriation” shortly after 8:00 P.M. on Friday night. After an argument with his wife (which I certainly did not hear… and I was there), Dunning struck her with a hammer, breaking her arm, and then killed his twelve-year-old son, Arthur Dunning, when Arthur tried to defend his mother.
The story was continued on page 12. When I turned there, I was greeted by a snapshot of my old frenemy Bill Turcotte. According to the story, “Mr. Turcotte was passing by when he heard shouts and screams from the Dunning residence.” He rushed up the walk, saw what was going on through the open door, and told Mr. Frank Dunning “to stop laying about with that hammer.” Dunning refused; Mr. Turcotte spotted a sheathed hunting knife on Dunning’s belt and pulled it free; Dunning rounded on Mr. Turcotte, who grappled with him; during the ensuing struggle, Dunning was stabbed to death. Only moments later, the heroic Mr. Turcotte suffered a heart attack.
I sat looking at the old snapshot—Turcotte standing with one foot placed proudly on the bumper of a late forties sedan, cigarette in the corner of his mouth—and drumming my fingers on my thighs. Dunning had been stabbed from the back, not from the front, and with a bayonet, not a hunting knife. Dunning hadn’t even had a hunting knife. The sledgehammer—which was not identified as such—had been his only weapon. Could the police have missed such glaring details? I didn’t see how, unless they were as blind as Ray Charles. Yet for Derry as I had come to know it, all this made perfect sense.
I think I was smiling. The story was so crazy it was admirable. All the loose ends were tied up. You had your crazy drunk husband, your cowering, terrified family, and your heroic passerby (no indication what he’d been passing by on his way to). What else did you need? And there was no mention of a certain Mysterious Stranger at the scene. It was all so Derry.
I rummaged in the fridge, found some leftover chocolate pudding, and hoovered it up while standing at the counter and looking out into my backyard. I picked up Elmore and petted him until he wriggled to be put down. I returned to my computer, tapped a key to magic away the screensaver, and looked at the picture of Bill Turcotte some more. The heroic intervener who had saved the family and suffered a heart attack for his pains.
At last I went to the telephone and dialed directory assistance.
8
There was no listing for Doris, Troy, or Harold Dunning in Derry. As a last resort I tried Ellen, not expecting anything; even if she were still in town, she’d probably taken the name of her husband. But sometimes longshots are lucky shots (Lee Harvey Oswald being a particularly malignant case in point). I was so surprised when the phone-robot coughed up a number that I wasn’t even holding my pencil. Rather than redial directory assistance, I pushed 1 to call the number I’d requested. Given time to think about it, I’m not sure I would have done that. Sometimes we don’t want to know, do we? Sometimes we’re afraid to know. We go just so far, then turn back. But I held bravely onto the receiver and listened as a phone in Derry rang once, twice, three times. The answering machine would probably kick on after the next one, and I decided I didn’t want to leave a message. I had no idea what to say.
But halfway through the fourth ring, a woman said: “Hello?”
“Is this Ellen Dunning?”
“Well, I guess that depends on who’s calling.” She sounded cautiously amused. The voice was smoky and a little insinuating. If I didn’t know better, I would have imagined a woman in her thirties rather than one who was now either sixty or pushing it hard. It was the voice, I thought, of someone who used it professionally. A singer? An actress? Maybe a comedian (or comedienne) after all? None of them seemed likely in Derry.
“My name is George Amberson. I knew your brother Harry a long time ago. I was back in Maine, and I thought maybe I’d try to get in touch.”
“Harry?” She sounded startled. “Oh my God! Was it in the Army?”
Had it been? I thought fast and decided that couldn’t be my story. Too many potential pitfalls.
“No, no, back in Derry. When we were kids.” Inspiration struck. “We used to play at the Rec. Same teams. Palled around a lot.”
“Well, I’m sorry to tell you this, Mr. Amberson, but Harry’s dead.”
For a moment I was dumbstruck. Only that doesn’t work on the phone, does it? I managed to say, “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. In Vietnam. During the Tet Offensive.”
I sat down, feeling sick to my stomach. I’d saved him from a limp and some mental fogginess only to cut his lifespan by forty years or so? Terrific. The surgery was a success, but the patient died.
Meanwhile, the show had to go on.
“What about Troy? And you, how are you? You were just a little kid back then, riding a bike with training wheels. And singing. You were always singing.” I essayed a feeble laugh. “Gosh, you used to drive us crazy.”