by Stephen King
“Hawaii won’t be a state until next year.”
“Oh.” I felt a little out of breath, as if someone had just punched me in the gut. “So … you get stopped for speeding, and the cop just assumes you are who this card claims you are?”
“Why not? If you say something about a terrorist attack in 1958, people are gonna think you’re talking about teenagers tipping cows. Sign these, too.”
He handed me a Hertz Courtesy Card, a Cities Service gas card, a Diners Club card, and an American Express card. The Amex was celluloid, the Diners Club cardboard. George Amberson’s name was on them. Typed, not printed.
“You can get a genuine plastic Amex card next year, if you want.”
I smiled. “No checkbook?”
“I coulda got you one, but what good would it do you? Any paperwork I filled out on George Amberson’s behalf would be lost in the next reset. Also any cash I put into the account.”
“Oh.” I felt like a dummy. “Right.”
“Don’t get down on yourself, all this is still new to you. You’ll want to start an account, though. I’d suggest no more than a thousand. Keep most of the dough in cash, and where you can grab it.”
“In case I have to come back in a hurry.”
“Right. And the credit cards are just identity-backers. The actual accounts I opened to get them are going to be wiped out when you go back through. They might come in handy, though—you can never tell.”
“Does George get his mail at Nineteen Bluebird Lane?”
“In 1958, Bluebird Lane’s just an address on a Sabattus plat map, buddy. The development where you live hasn’t been built yet. If anybody asks you about that, just say it’s a business thing. They’ll buy it. Business is like a god in ’58—everybody worships it but nobody understands it. Here.”
He tossed me a gorgeous man’s wallet. I gaped at it. “Is this ostrich?”
“I wanted you to look prosperous,” Al said. “Find some pictures to put in it along with your identification. I got you some other odds and ends, too. More ballpoint pens, one a fad item with a combination letter-opener and ruler on the end. A Scripto mechanical pencil. A pocket protector. In ’58 they’re considered necessary, not nerdy. A Bulova watch on a Speidel chrome expansion band—all the cool cats will dig that one, daddy. You can sort the rest out for yourself.” He coughed long and hard, wincing. When he stopped, sweat was standing out on his face in large drops.
“Al, when did you put all this together?”
“When I realized I wasn’t going to make it into 1963, I left Texas and came home. I already had you in mind. Divorced, no children, smart, best of all, young. Oh, here, almost forgot. This is the seed everything else grew from. Got the name off a gravestone in the St. Cyril’s boneyard and just wrote an application letter to the Maine Secretary of State.”
He handed me my birth certificate. I ran my fingers over the embossed franking. It had a silky official feel.
When I looked up, I saw he’d put another sheet of paper on the table. It was headed SPORTS 1958–1963. “Don’t lose it. Not only because it’s your meal ticket, but because you’d have a lot of questions to answer if it fell into the wrong hands. Especially when the picks start to prove out.”
I started to put everything back into the box, and he shook his head. “I’ve got a Lord Buxton briefcase for you in my closet, all nicely battered around the edges.”
“I don’t need it—I’ve got my backpack. It’s in the trunk of my car.”
He looked amused. “Where you’re going, nobody wears backpacks except Boy Scouts, and they only wear them when they’re going on hikes and Camporees. You’ve got a lot to learn, buddy, but if you step careful and don’t take chances, you’ll get there.”
I realized I was really going to do this, and it was going to happen right away, with almost no preparation. I felt like a visitor to the London docks of the seventeenth century who suddenly becomes aware he’s about to be shanghaied.
“But what do I do?” This came out in a near bleat.
He raised his eyebrows—bushy and now as white as the thinning hair on his head. “You save the Dunning family. Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?”
“I don’t mean that. What do I do when people ask me how I make my living? What do I say?”
“Your rich uncle died, remember? Tell them you’re piecing your windfall inheritance out a little at a time, making it last long enough for you to write a book. Isn’t there a frustrated writer inside every English teacher? Or am I wrong about that?”
Actually, he wasn’t.
He sat looking at me—haggard, far too thin, but not without sympathy. Perhaps even pity. At last he said, very softly, “It’s big, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said. “And Al … man … I’m just a little guy.”
“You could say the same of Oswald. A pipsqueak who shot from ambush. And according to Harry Dunning’s theme, his father’s just a mean drunk with a hammer.”
“He’s not even that anymore. He died of acute stomach poisoning in Shawshank State Prison. Harry said it was probably bad squeeze. That’s—”
“I know what squeeze is. I saw plenty when I was stationed in the Philippines. Even drank some, to my sorrow. But he’s not dead where you’re going. Oswald, either.”
“Al … I know you’re sick, and I know you’re in pain. But can you come down to the diner with me? I …” For the first and last time, I used his habitual form of address. “Buddy, I don’t want to start this alone. I’m scared.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” He hooked a hand under his armpit and stood up with a grimace that rolled his lips back to the gumlines. “You get the briefcase. I’ll get dressed.”
8
It was quarter to eight when Al unlocked the door of the silver trailer that the Famous Fatburger called home. The glimmering chrome fixtures behind the counter looked ghostly. The stools seemed to whisper no one will sit on us again. The big old-fashioned sugar shakers seemed to whisper back no one will pour from us again—the party’s over.
“Make way for L.L. Bean,” I said.
“That’s right,” Al said. “The fucking march of progress.”
He was out of breath, panting, but didn’t pause to rest. He led me behind the counter and to the pantry door. I followed, switching the briefcase with my new life inside it from one hand to the other. It was the old-fashioned kind, with buckles. If I’d carried it into my homeroom at LHS, most of the kids would have laughed. A few others—those with an emerging sense of style—might have applauded its retro funk.
Al opened the door on the smells of vegetables, spices, coffee. He once more reached past my shoulder to turn on the light. I gazed at the gray linoleum floor the way a man might stare at a pool that could well be filled with hungry sharks, and when Al tapped me on the shoulder, I jumped.
“Sorry,” he said, “but you ought to take this.” He was holding out a fifty-cent piece. Half a rock. “The Yellow Card Man, remember him?”
“Sure I do.” Actually I’d forgotten all about him. My heart was beating hard enough to make my eyeballs feel like they were pulsing in their sockets. My tongue tasted like an old piece of carpet, and when he handed me the coin, I almost dropped it.
He gave me a final critical look. “The jeans are okay for now, but you ought to stop at Mason’s Menswear on upper Main Street and get some slacks before you head north. Pendletons or khaki twill is fine for everyday. Ban-Lon for dress.”
“Ban-Lon?”
“Just ask, they’ll know. You’ll also need to get some dress shirts. Eventually a suit. Also some ties and a tie clip. Buy yourself a hat, too. Not a baseball cap, a nice summer straw.”
There were tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. This frightened me more thoroughly than anything he’d said.
“Al? What’s wrong?”
“I’m just scared, same as you are. No need for an emotional parting scene, though. If you’re coming back, you’ll be here in two minutes no matte
r how long you stay in ’58. Just time enough for me to start the coffeemaker. If it works out, we’ll have a nice cup together, and you can tell me all about it.”
If. What a big word.
“You could say a prayer, too. There’d be time for that, wouldn’t there?”
“Sure. I’ll be praying that it goes nice and smooth. Don’t get so dazed by where you are that you forget you’re dealing with a dangerous man. More dangerous than Oswald, maybe.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Okay. Keep your mouth shut as much as you can until you pick up the lingo and the feel of the place. Go slow. Don’t make waves.”
I tried to smile, but I’m not sure I made it. The briefcase felt very heavy, as if it were filled with rocks instead of money and bogus ID. I thought I might faint. And yet, God help me, part of me still wanted to go. Couldn’t wait to go. I wanted to see the USA in my Chevrolet; America was asking me to call.
Al held out his thin and trembling hand. “Good luck, Jake. God bless.”
“George, you mean.”
“George, right. Now get going. As they say back then, it’s time for you to split the scene.”
I turned and walked slowly into the pantry, moving like a man trying to locate the top of a staircase with the lights out.
On my third step, I found it.
PART 2
THE JANITOR’S FATHER
CHAPTER 5
1
I walked along the side of the drying shed, just like before. I ducked under the chain with the NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT sign hanging from it, just like before. I walked around the corner of the big green-painted cube of a building just like before, and then something smacked into me. I’m not particularly heavy for my height, but I’ve got some meat on my bones—“You won’t blow away in a high wind,” my father used to say—and still the Yellow Card Man almost knocked me over. It was like being attacked by a black overcoat full of flapping birds. He was yelling something, but I was too startled (not scared, exactly, it was all too quick for that) to have any idea what it was.
I pushed him away and he stumbled back against the drying shed with his coat swirling around his legs. There was a bonk sound when the back of his head struck the metal, and his filthy fedora tumbled to the ground. He followed it down, not in a tumble but in a kind of accordion collapse. I was sorry for what I’d done even before my heart had a chance to settle into a more normal rhythm, and sorrier still when he picked up his hat and began brushing at it with one dirty hand. The hat was never going to be clean again, and, in all probability, neither was he.
“Are you okay?” I asked, but when I bent down to touch his shoulder, he went scuttering away from me along the side of the shed, pushing with his hands and sliding on his butt. I’d say he looked like a crippled spider, but he didn’t. He looked like what he was: a wino with a brain that was damp going on wet. A man who might be as close to death as Al Templeton was, because in this fifty-plus-years-ago America there were probably no charity-supported shelters or rehabs for guys like him. The VA might take him if he’d ever worn the uniform, but who would take him to the VA? Nobody, probably, although someone—a mill foreman would be the most likely—might call the cops on him. They’d put him in the drunk tank for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. If he didn’t die of DT-induced convulsions while he was in there, they’d turn him loose to start the next cycle. I found myself wishing my ex-wife was here—she could find an AA meeting and take him to it. Only Christy wouldn’t be born for another twenty-one years.
I put the briefcase between my feet and held my hands out to show him they were empty, but he cringed even further down the side of the drying shed. Spittle gleamed on his stubbly chin. I looked around to be sure we weren’t attracting attention, saw that we had this part of the millyard to ourselves, and tried again. “I only pushed you because you startled me.”
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, his voice cracking through about five different registers. If I hadn’t heard the question on my last visit, I wouldn’t have had any idea what he was asking … and although the slur was the same, wasn’t the inflection a little different this time? I wasn’t sure, but I thought so. He’s harmless, but he’s not like anyone else, Al had said. It’s like he knows something. Al thought it was because he happened to be sunning himself near the rabbit-hole at 11:58 in the morning on September 9, 1958, and was susceptible to its influence. The way you can produce static on a TV screen if you run a mixer close to it. Maybe that was it. Or, hell, maybe it was just the booze.
“Nobody important,” I said in my most soothing voice. “Nobody you need to concern yourself with. My name’s George. What’s yours?”
“Motherfucker!” he snarled, and scrambled yet further from me. If that was his name, it was certainly an unusual one. “You’re not supposed to be here!”
“Don’t worry, I’m leaving,” I said. I picked up the briefcase to demonstrate my sincerity, and he hunched his thin shoulders all the way up to his ears, as if he expected me to hurl it at him. He was like a dog that’s been beaten so often it expects no other treatment. “No harm and no foul, okay?”
“Get out, bastard-ball! Go back to where you came from and leave me alone!”
“It’s a deal.” I was still recovering from the startle he’d given me, and the residual adrenaline mixed badly with the pity I felt—not to mention the exasperation. The same exasperation I’d felt with Christy when I came home to discover she was drunk-going-on-shitfaced again in spite of all her promises to straighten up, fly right, and quit the booze once and for all. The combination of emotions added to the heat of this late summer midday was making me feel a little sick to my stomach. Probably not the best way to start a rescue mission.
I thought of the Kennebec Fruit and how good that root beer had been; I could see the gasp of vapor from the ice cream freezer as Frank Anicetti Senior pulled out the big mug. Also, it had been blessedly cool in there. I started in that direction with no further ado, my new (but carefully aged around the edges) briefcase banging against the side of my knee.
“Hey! Hey, you, whatsyaface!”
I turned. The wino was struggling to his feet, using the side of the drying shed as a support. He had snagged his hat and was holding it crushed against his midsection. Now he began to fumble at it. “I got a yellow card from the greenfront, so gimme a buck, motherfucker. Today’s double-money day.”
We were back on message. That was comforting. Nonetheless, I took pains not to approach him too closely. I didn’t want to scare him again or provoke another attack. I stopped six feet away and held out my hand. The coin Al had given me gleamed on my palm. “I can’t spare a buck, but here’s half a rock.”
He hesitated, now holding his hat in his left hand. “You better not want a suck-job.”
“Tempting, but I think I can resist.”
“Huh?” He looked from the fifty-cent piece to my face, then back down at the money again. He raised his right hand to wipe the slick of drool off his chin, and I saw another difference from before. Nothing earth-shattering, but enough to make me wonder about the solidity of Al’s claim that each time was a complete reset.
“I don’t care if you take it or leave it, but make up your mind,” I said. “I’ve got things to do.”
He snatched the coin, then cowered back against the drying shed again. His eyes were large and wet. The slick of drool had reappeared on his chin. There’s really nothing in the world that can match the glamour of a late-stage alcoholic; I can’t think why Jim Beam, Seagram’s, and Mike’s Hard Lemonade don’t use them in their magazine ads. Drink Beam and see a better class of bugs.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“A job, I hope. Listen, have you tried AA for that little problem you’ve got with the boo—”
“Fuck off, Jimla!”
I had no idea what a jimla might be, the fuck off part came through loud and clear. I headed for the gate, expecting him to hurl more questions after m
e. He hadn’t before, but this encounter had been markedly different.
Because he wasn’t the Yellow Card Man, not this time. When he raised his hand to wipe his chin, the card clutched in it had no longer been yellow.
This time it was a dirty but still bright orange.
2
I threaded my way through the mill parking lot, once again tapping the trunk of the white-over-red Plymouth Fury for good luck. I was certainly going to need all of that I could get. I crossed the train tracks, once again hearing the wuff-chuff of a train, only this time it sounded a little more distant, because this time my encounter with the Yellow Card Man—who was now the Orange Card Man—had taken a bit longer. The air stank of mill effluent as it had before, and the same intercity bus snored past. Because I was a little late this time, I couldn’t read the route sign, but I remembered what it said: LEWISTON EXPRESS. I wondered idly how many times Al had seen that same bus, with the same passengers looking out the windows.
I hurried across the street, waving away the blue cloud of bus exhaust as best I could. The rockabilly rebel was at his post outside the door, and I wondered briefly what he’d say if I stole his line. But in a way that would be as mean as terrorizing the drying shed wino on purpose; if you stole the secret language belonging to kids like this, they didn’t have much left. This one couldn’t even go back and pound on the Xbox. So I just nodded.
He nodded back. “Hi-ho, Daddy-O.”
I went inside. The bell jingled. I went past the discount comic books and straight to the soda fountain where Frank Anicetti Senior was standing. “What can I do for you today, my friend?”
For a moment I was stumped, because that wasn’t what he’d said before. Then I realized it wouldn’t be. Last time I’d grabbed a newspaper out of the rack. This time I hadn’t. Maybe each trip back to 1958 reset the odometer back to all zeros (with the exception of the Yellow Card Man), but the first time you varied something, everything was up for grabs. The idea was both scary and liberating.
“I could use a root beer,” I said.