11/22/63 Part 5

"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 pa.s.sengers. 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 cla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+t 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 a.s.sa.s.sinations-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 p.r.o.nounal a.s.sumptions 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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, G.o.d 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.mper cars at an amus.e.m.e.nt park. Finally it abated. He glanced at the pad, winced, folded it up, and threw it away.

"Sorry, buddy. This oral menstruation's a b.i.t.c.h."

"Jesus, Al!"

He shrugged. "If you can't joke about it, what's the point of anything? Now where was I?"

"b.u.t.terfly effect."

"Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a b.u.t.terfly 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 h.o.a.ry 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 f.u.c.k 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 Amba.s.sador 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 b.u.t.terfly 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-cla.s.s 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate only a few months before gunning Kennedy down, you'd go 'Huh?' Because somehow all that stuff has gotten lost."

"Oswald tried to kill someone before Kennedy?" This was news to me, but most of my knowledge of the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination came from an Oliver Stone movie. In any case, Al didn't answer. Al was on a roll.

"Or what about Vietnam? Johnson was the one who started all the insane escalation. Kennedy was a cold warrior, no doubt about it, but Johnson took it to the next level. He had the same my-b.a.l.l.s-are-bigger-than-yours complex that Dubya showed off when he stood in front of the cameras and said 'Bring it on.' Kennedy might have changed his mind. Johnson and Nixon were incapable of that. Thanks to them, we lost almost sixty thousand American soldiers in Nam. The Vietnamese, North and South, lost millions. Is the butcher's bill that high if Kennedy doesn't die in Dallas?"

"I don't know. And neither do you, Al."

"That's true, but I've become quite the student of recent American history, and I think the chances of improving things by saving him are very good. And really, there's no downside. If things turn to s.h.i.+t, you just take it all back. Easy as erasing a dirty word off a chalkboard."

"Or I can't get back, in which case I never know."

"Bulls.h.i.+t. You're young. As long as you don't get run over by a taxicab or have a heart attack, you'd live long enough to know how things turn out."

I sat silent, looking down at my lap and thinking. Al let me. At last I raised my head again.

"You must have read a lot about the a.s.sa.s.sination and about Oswald."

"Everything I could get my hands on, buddy."

"How sure are you that he did it? Because there are about a thousand conspiracy theories. Even I know that. What if I went back and stopped him and some other guy popped Kennedy from the Gra.s.sy Hill, or whatever it was?"

"Gra.s.sy Knoll. And I'm close to positive it was all Oswald. The conspiracy theories were all pretty crazy to begin with, and most of them have been disproved over the years. The idea that the shooter wasn't Oswald at all, but someone who looked like him, for instance. The body was exhumed in 1981 and DNA tested. It was him, all right. The poisonous little f.u.c.k." He paused, then added: "I met him, you know."

I stared at him. "Bulls.h.i.+t!"

"Oh yes. He spoke to me. This was in Fort Worth. He and Marina-his wife, she was Russian-were visiting Oswald's brother in Fort Worth. If Lee ever loved anybody, it was his brother Bobby. I was standing outside the picket fence around Bobby Oswald's yard, leaning against a phone pole, smoking a cigarette and pretending to read the paper. My heart was hammering what felt like two hundred beats a minute. Lee and Marina came out together. She was carrying their daughter, June. Just a mite of a thing, less than a year old. The kid was asleep. Ozzie was wearing khaki pants and a b.u.t.ton-down Ivy League s.h.i.+rt that was all frayed around the collar. The slacks had a sharp crease, but they were dirty. He'd given up his Marine cut, but his hair would still have been way too short to grab. Marina-holy Christ, what a knockout! Dark hair, bright blue eyes, flawless skin. She looks like a G.o.ddam movie star. If you do this, you'll see for yourself. She said something to him in Russian as they came down the walk. He said something back. He was smiling when he said it, but then he pushed her. She almost fell over. The kid woke up and started to cry. All this time, Oswald kept smiling."

"You saw this. You actually did. You saw him." In spite of my own trip back in time, I was at least half-convinced that this had to be either a delusion or an outright lie.

"I did. She came out through the gate and walked past me with her head down, holding the baby against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Like I wasn't there. But he walked right up to me, close enough for me to smell the Old Spice he was wearing to try and cover up the smell of his sweat. There were blackheads all over his nose. You could tell looking at his clothes-and his shoes, which were scuffed and busted down at the backs-that he didn't have a pot to p.i.s.s in or a window to throw it out of, but when you looked in his face, you knew that didn't matter. Not to him, it didn't. He thought he was a big deal."

Al considered briefly, then shook his head.

"No, I take that back. He knew he was a big deal. It was just a matter of waiting for the rest of the world to catch up on that. So there he is, in my face-choking distance, and don't think the idea didn't cross my mind-"

"Why didn't you? Or just cut to the chase and shoot him?"

"In front of his wife and baby? Could you do that, Jake?"

I didn't have to consider it for long. "Guess not."

"Me either. I had other reasons, too. One of them was an aversion to state prison . . . or the electric chair. We were out on the street, remember."

"Ah."

"Ah is right. He still had that little smile on his face when he walked up to me. Arrogant and prissy, both at the same time. He's wearing that smile in just about every photograph anybody ever took of him. He's wearing it in the Dallas police station after they arrested him for killing the president and a motor patrolman who happened to cross his path when he was trying to get away. He says to me, 'What are you looking at, sir?' I say 'Nothing, buddy.' And he says, 'Then mind your beeswax.'

"Marina was waiting for him maybe twenty feet down the sidewalk, trying to soothe the baby back to sleep. It was hotter than h.e.l.l that day, but she was wearing a kerchief over her hair, the way lots of European women do back then. He went to her and grabbed her elbow-like a cop instead of her husband-and says, 'Pokhoda! Pokhoda!' Walk, walk. She said something to him, maybe asking if he'd carry the baby for awhile. That's my guess, anyway. But he just pushed her away and said, 'Pokhoda, cyka!' Walk, b.i.t.c.h. She did. They went off down toward the bus stop. And that was it."

"You speak Russian?"

"No, but I have a good ear and a computer. Back here I do, anyway."