by Stephen King
It sounded new.
Did I want to spend years in the past? No. But I did want to go back. If only to hear how Little Richard sounded when he was still top of the pops. Or get on a Trans World Airlines plane without having to take off my shoes, submit to a full-body scan, and go through a metal detector.
And I wanted another root beer.
CHAPTER 3
1
The gnome did indeed have a flag, but not an American one. Not even the Maine flag with the moose on it. The one the gnome was holding had a vertical blue stripe and two fat horizontal stripes, the top one white and the bottom one red. It also had a single star. I gave the gnome a pat on his pointy hat as I went past and mounted the front steps of Al’s little house on Vining Street, thinking about an amusing song by Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Screw You, We’re from Texas.”
The door opened before I could ring the bell. Al was wearing a bathrobe over pajamas, and his newly white hair was in corkscrew tangles—a serious case of bedhead if I’d ever seen one. But the sleep (and the painkillers, of course) had done him some good. He still looked sick, but the lines around his mouth weren’t so deep and his gait, as he led me down the short stub of a hall and into his living room, seemed surer. He was no longer pressing his right hand into his left armpit, as if trying to hold himself together.
“Look a little more like my old self, do I?” he asked in his gravelly voice as he sat down in the easy chair in front of the TV. Only he didn’t really sit, just kind of positioned himself and dropped.
“You do. What have the doctors told you?”
“The one I saw in Portland says there’s no hope, not even with chemo and radiation. Exactly what the doc I saw in Dallas said. In 1962, that was. Nice to think some things don’t change, don’t you think?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Sometimes there’s nothing to say. Sometimes you’re just stumped.
“No sense beating around the bush about it,” he said. “I know death’s embarrassing to folks, especially when the one dying has nothing but his own bad habits to blame, but I can’t waste time being delicate. I’ll be in the hospital soon enough, if for no other reason than I won’t be able to get back and forth to the bathroom on my own. I’ll be damned if I’ll sit around coughing my brains out and hip deep in my own shit.”
“What happens to the diner?”
“The diner’s finished, buddy. Even if I was healthy as a horse, it would be gone by the end of this month. You know I always just rented that space, don’t you?”
I didn’t, but it made sense. Although Worumbo was still called Worumbo, it was now your basic trendy shopping center, so that meant Al had been paying rent to some corporation.
“My lease is up for renewal, and Mill Associates wants that space to put in something called—you’re going to love this—an L.L. Bean Express. Besides, they say my little Aluminaire’s an eyesore.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I said, and with such genuine indignation that Al chuckled. The chuckles tried to morph into a coughing fit and he stifled them. Here in the privacy of his own home, he wasn’t using tissues, handkerchiefs, or napkins to deal with that cough; there was a box of maxi pads on the table beside his chair. My eyes kept straying to them. I’d urge them away, perhaps to look at the photo on the wall of Al with his arm around a good-looking woman, then find them straying back. Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble.
“Thanks for saying that, buddy. We could have a drink on it. My alcohol days are over, but there’s iced tea in the fridge. Maybe you’d do the honors.”
2
He used sturdy generic glassware at the restaurant, but the pitcher holding the iced tea looked like Waterford to me. A whole lemon bobbed placidly on top, the skin cut to let the flavor seep out. I choked a couple of glasses with ice, poured, and went back into the living room. Al took a long, deep swallow of his and closed his eyes gratefully.
“Boy, is that good. Right this minute everything in Al World is good. That dope’s wonderful stuff. Addictive as hell, of course, but wonderful. It even suppresses the coughing a little. The pain’ll start creeping in again by midnight, but that should give us enough time to talk this through.” He sipped again and gave me a look of rueful amusement. “Human things are terrific right to the end, it seems like. I never would have guessed.”
“Al, what happens to that … that hole into the past, if they pull your trailer and build an outlet store where it was?”
“I don’t know that any more than I know how I can buy the same meat over and over again. What I think is it’ll disappear. I think it’s as much a freak of nature as Old Faithful, or that weird balancing rock they’ve got in western Australia, or a river that runs backward at certain phases of the moon. Things like that are delicate, buddy. A little shift in the earth’s crust, a change in the temperature, a few sticks of dynamite, and they’re gone.”
“So you don’t think there’ll be … I don’t know … some kind of cataclysm?” What I was picturing in my mind was a breach in the cabin of an airliner cruising at thirty-six thousand feet, and everything being sucked out, including the passengers. I saw that in a movie once.
“I don’t think so, but who can tell? All I know is that there’s nothing I can do about it, either way. Unless you want me to deed the place over to you, that is. I could do that. Then you could go to the National Historical Preservation Society and tell them, ‘Hey, guys, you can’t let them put up an outlet store in the courtyard of the old Worumbo mill. There’s a time tunnel there. I know it’s hard to believe, but let me show you.’”
For a moment I actually considered this, because Al was probably right: the fissure leading into the past was almost certainly delicate. For all I knew (or he did), it could pop like a soap bubble if the Aluminaire was even joggled hard. Then I thought of the federal government discovering they could send special ops into the past to change whatever they wanted. I didn’t know if that were possible, but if so, the folks who gave us fun stuff like bio-weapons and computer-guided smart bombs were the last folks I’d want carrying their various agendas into living, unarmored history.
The minute this idea occurred to me—no, the very second—I knew what Al had in mind. Only the specifics were missing. I set my iced tea aside and stood up.
“No. Absolutely not. Uh-uh.”
He took this calmly. I could say it was because he was stoned on OxyContin, but I knew better. He could see I didn’t mean to just walk out no matter what I said. My curiosity (not to mention my fascination) was probably sticking out like porcupine quills. Because part of me did want to know the specifics.
“I see I can skip the introductory material and get right down to business,” Al said. “That’s good. Sit down, Jake, and I’ll let you in on my only reason for not just taking my whole supply of little pink pills at once.” And when I stayed on my feet: “You know you want to hear this, and what harm? Even if I could make you do something here in 2011—which I can’t—I couldn’t make you do anything back there. Once you get back there, Al Templeton’s a four-year-old kid in Bloomington, Indiana, racing around his backyard in a Lone Ranger mask and still a bit iffy in the old toilet-training department. So sit down. Like they say in the infomercials, you’re under no obligation.”
Right. On the other hand, my mother would have said the devil’s voice is sweet.
But I sat down.
3
“Do you know the phrase watershed moment, buddy?”
I nodded. You didn’t have to be an English teacher to know that one; you didn’t even have to be literate. It was one of those annoying linguistic shortcuts that show up on cable TV news shows, day in and day out. Others include connect the dots and at this point in time. The most annoying of all (I have inveighed against it to my clearly bored students time and time and time again) is the totally meaningless some people say, or many
people believe.
“Do you know where it comes from? The origin?”
“Nope.”
“Cartography. A watershed is an area of land, usually mountains or forests, that drains into a river. History is also a river. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“Yes. I suppose I would.” I drank some of my tea.
“Sometimes the events that change history are widespread—like heavy, prolonged rains over an entire watershed that can send a river out of its banks. But rivers can flood even on sunny days. All it takes is a heavy, prolonged downpour in one small area of the watershed. There are flash floods in history, too. Want some examples? How about 9/11? Or what about Bush beating Gore in 2000?”
“You can’t compare a national election to a flash flood, Al.”
“Maybe not most of them, but the 2000 presidential election was in a class by itself. Suppose you could go back to Florida in the fall of Double-O and spend two hundred thousand dollars or so on Al Gore’s behalf?”
“Couple of problems with that,” I said. “First, I don’t have two hundred thousand dollars. Second, I’m a schoolteacher. I can tell you all about Thomas Wolfe’s mother fixation, but when it comes to politics I’m a babe in the woods.”
He gave an impatient flap of his hand, which almost sent his Marine Corps ring flying off his reduced finger. “Money’s not a problem. You’ll just have to trust me on that for now. And advance knowledge usually trumps the shit out of experience. The difference in Florida was supposedly less than six hundred votes. Do you think you could buy six hundred votes on Election Day with two hundred grand, if buying was what it came down to?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Probably. I guess I’d isolate some communities where there’s a lot of apathy and the voting turnout’s traditionally light—it wouldn’t take all that much research—then go in with the old cashola.”
Al grinned, revealing his missing teeth and unhealthy gums. “Why not? It worked in Chicago for years.”
The idea of buying the presidency for less than the cost of two Mercedes-Benz sedans silenced me.
“But when it comes to the river of history, the watershed moments most susceptible to change are assassinations—the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria gets shot by a mentally unstable pipsqueak named Gavrilo Princip and there’s your kickoff to World War I. On the other hand, after Claus von Stauffenberg failed to kill Hitler in 1944—close, but no cigar—the war continued and millions more died.”
I had seen that movie, too.
Al said, “There’s nothing we can do about Archduke Ferdinand or Adolf Hitler. They’re out of our reach.”
I thought of accusing him of making pronounal assumptions and kept my mouth shut. I felt a little like a man reading a very grim book. A Thomas Hardy novel, say. You know how it’s going to end, but instead of spoiling things, that somehow increases your fascination. It’s like watching a kid run his electric train faster and faster and waiting for it to derail on one of the curves.
“As for 9/11, if you wanted to fix that one, you’d have to wait around for forty-three years. You’d be pushing eighty, if you made it at all.”
Now the lone-star flag the gnome had been holding made sense. It was a souvenir of Al’s last jaunt into the past. “You couldn’t even make it to ’63, could you?”
To this he didn’t reply, just watched me. His eyes, which had looked rheumy and vague when he let me into the diner that afternoon, now looked bright. Almost young.
“Because that’s what you’re talking about, right? Dallas in 1963?”
“That’s right,” he said. “I had to opt out. But you’re not sick, buddy. You’re healthy and in the prime of life. You can go back, and you can stop it.”
He leaned forward, his eyes not just bright; they were blazing.
“You can change history, Jake. Do you understand that? John Kennedy can live.”
4
I know the basics of suspense fiction—I ought to, I’ve read enough thrillers in my lifetime—and the prime rule is to keep the reader guessing. But if you’ve gotten any feel for my character at all, based on that day’s extraordinary events, you’ll know that I wanted to be convinced. Christy Epping had become Christy Thompson (boy meets girl on the AA campus, remember?), and I was a man on his own. We didn’t even have any kids to fight over. I had a job I was good at, but if I told you it was challenging, it would be a lie. Hitchhiking around Canada with a buddy after my senior year of college was the closest thing to an adventure I’d ever had, and given the cheerful, helpful nature of most Canadians, it wasn’t much of an adventure. Now, all of a sudden, I’d been offered a chance to become a major player not just in American history but in the history of the world. So yes, yes, yes, I wanted to be convinced.
But I was also afraid.
“What if it went wrong?” I drank down the rest of my iced tea in four long swallows, the ice cubes clicking against my teeth. “What if I managed, God knows how, to stop it from happening and made things worse instead of better? What if I came back and discovered America had become a fascist regime? Or that the pollution had gotten so bad everybody was walking around in gas masks?”
“Then you’d go back again,” he said. “Back to two minutes of twelve on September ninth of 1958. Cancel the whole thing out. Every trip is the first trip, remember?”
“Sounds good, but what if the changes were so radical your little diner wasn’t even there anymore?”
He grinned. “Then you’d have to live your life in the past. But would that be so bad? As an English teacher, you’d still have a marketable skill, and you wouldn’t even need it. I was there for four years, Jake, and I made a small fortune. Do you know how?”
I could have taken an educated guess, but I shook my head.
“Betting. I was careful—I didn’t want to raise any suspicions, and I sure didn’t want some bookie’s leg-breakers coming after me—but when you’ve studied up on who won every big sporting event between the summer of 1958 and the fall of 1963, you can afford to be careful. I won’t say you can live like a king, because that’s living dangerously. But there’s no reason you can’t live well. And I think the diner’ll still be there. It has been for me, and I changed plenty of things. Anybody does. Just walking around the block to buy a loaf of bread and a quart of milk changes the future. Ever hear of the butterfly effect? It’s a fancy-shmancy scientific theory that basically boils down to the idea that—”
He started coughing again, the first protracted fit since he’d let me in. He grabbed one of the maxis from the box, plastered it across his mouth like a gag, and then doubled over. Gruesome retching sounds came up from his chest. It sounded as if half his works had come loose and were slamming around in there like bumper cars at an amusement park. Finally it abated. He glanced at the pad, winced, folded it up, and threw it away.
“Sorry, buddy. This oral menstruation’s a bitch.”
“Jesus, Al!”
He shrugged. “If you can’t joke about it, what’s the point of anything? Now where was I?”
“Butterfly effect.”
“Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later—or four hundred—there’s an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?”
It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. “Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?”
He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?”
That was a good question, so I just told him to go on.
“You changed the past this afternoon in all sorts of little ways, just by walking into the Kennebec Fruit … but the stairs leading up into the pantry and back into 2011 were still there, weren’t they? And The Falls is the same as when you left it.”
“So it seems, yes. But you’re talking about something a little more major. To wit, saving JFK’
s life.”
“Oh, I’m talking about a lot more than that, because this ain’t some butterfly in China, buddy. I’m also talking about saving RFK’s life, because if John lives in Dallas, Robert probably doesn’t run for president in 1968. The country wouldn’t have been ready to replace one Kennedy with another.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“No, but listen. Do you think that if you save John Kennedy’s life, his brother Robert is still at the Ambassador Hotel at twelve-fifteen in the morning on June fifth, 1968? And even if he is, is Sirhan Sirhan still working in the kitchen?”
Maybe, but the chances had to be awfully small. If you introduced a million variables into an equation, of course the answer was going to change.
“Or what about Martin Luther King? Is he still in Memphis in April of ’68? Even if he is, is he still standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at exactly the right time for James Earl Ray to shoot him? What do you think?”
“If that butterfly theory is right, probably not.”
“That’s what I think, too. And if MLK lives, the race riots that followed his death don’t happen. Maybe Fred Hampton doesn’t get shot in Chicago.”
“Who?”
He ignored me. “For that matter, maybe there’s no Symbionese Liberation Army. No SLA, no Patty Hearst kidnapping. No Patty Hearst kidnapping, a small but maybe significant reduction in black fear among middle-class whites.”
“You’re losing me. Remember, I was an English major.”
“I’m losing you because you know more about the Civil War in the nineteenth century than you do about the one that ripped this country apart after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas. If I asked you who starred in The Graduate, I’m sure you could tell me. But if I asked you to tell me who Lee Oswald tried to assassinate only a few months before gunning Kennedy down, you’d go ‘Huh?’ Because somehow all that stuff has gotten lost.”