11/22/63 Part 88

"Do you rent or own?"

"Oh, it's all mine," he said. "Such as it is."

"Good for you." Before, he had rented.

"You still haven't told me how you know my name."

"First, let's have that drink. I can use one."

The door opened on a parlor that took up the front half of the house. He told me to whoa, as if I were a horse, and lit a Coleman lantern. By its light I saw furniture of the type that is called "old but serviceable." There was a beautiful braided rug on the floor. No GED diploma on any of the walls-and of course no framed theme t.i.tled "The Day That Changed My Life"-but there were a great many Catholic icons and lots of pictures. It was with no surprise that I recognized some of the people in them. I had met them, after all.

"Lock that behind you, would you?"

I closed us off from the dark and disturbing Lisbon Falls, and ran both bolts.

"Deadbolt, too, if you don't mind."

I twisted it and heard a heavy clunk. Harry, meanwhile, was rolling around his parlor and lighting the same sort of long-chimneyed kerosene lamps I vaguely remembered seeing in my gramma Sarie's house. It was a better light for the room than the Coleman lamp, and when I killed its hot white glow, Harry Dunning nodded approvingly.

"What's your name, sir? You already know mine."

"Jake Epping. Don't suppose that rings any bells with you, does it?"

He considered, then shook his head. "Should it?"

"Probably not."

He stuck out his hand. It shook slightly with some incipient palsy. "I'll shake with you, just the same. That could have been nasty."

I shook his hand gladly. h.e.l.lo, new friend. h.e.l.lo, old friend.

"Okay, now that we got that took care of, we can drink with clear consciences. I'll get us that single malt." He started for the kitchen, rolling his wheels with arms that were a little shaky but still strong. The chair had a small motor, but either it didn't work or he was saving the battery. He looked back over his shoulder at me. "Not dangerous, are you? I mean, to me?"

"Not to you, Harry." I smiled. "I'm your good angel."

"This is f.u.c.king peculiar," he said. "But these days, what isn't?"

He went into the kitchen. Soon more light glowed. Homey orange-yellow light. In here, everything seemed homey. But out there . . . in the world . . .

Just what in the h.e.l.l had I done?

2.

"What'll we drink to?" I asked when we had our gla.s.ses in hand.

"Better times than these. Will that work for you, Mr. Epping?"

"It works fine. And make it Jake."

We clinked. Drank. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had anything stronger than Lone Star beer. The whisky was like hot honey.

"No electricity?" I asked, looking around at the lamps. He had turned them all low, presumably to save on oil.

He made a sour face. "Not from around here, are you?"

A question I'd heard before, from Frank Anicetti, at the Fruit. On my very first trip into the past. Then I'd told a lie. I didn't want to do that now.

"I don't quite know how to answer that, Harry."

He shrugged it off. "We're supposed to get juice three days a week, and this is supposed to be one of the days, but it cut off around six P.M. I believe in Province Electric like I believe in Santa Claus."

As I considered this, I remembered the stickers on the cars. "How long has Maine been a part of Canada?"

He gave me a how-crazy-are-you look, but I could see he was enjoying this. The strangeness of it and also the there-ness of it. I wondered when he'd last had a real conversation with someone. "Since 2005. Did someone b.u.mp you on the head, or something?"

"As a matter of fact, yes." I went to his wheelchair, dropped on the knee that still bent willingly and without pain, and showed him the place on the back of my head where the hair had never grown back. "I took a bad beating a few months ago-"

"Yuh, I seen you limping when you ran at those kids."

"-and now there's lots of things I don't remember."

The floor suddenly shook beneath us. The flames in the kerosene lamps trembled. The pictures on the walls rattled, and a two-feet-high plaster Jesus with his arms outstretched took a jittery stroll toward the edge of the mantelpiece. He looked like a guy contemplating suicide, and given the current state of things as I had observed them, I couldn't blame him.

"Popper," Harry said matter-of-factly when the shaking stopped. "You remember those, right?"

"No." I got up, went to the mantelpiece, and pushed Jesus back beside his Holy Mother.

"Thanks. I've already lost half the d.a.m.n disciples off the shelf in my bedroom, and I mourn every one. They were my mom's. Poppers are earth tremors. We get a lot of em, but most of the big-daddy quakes are in the Midwest or out California way. Europe and China too, of course."

"People tying up their boats in Idaho, are they?" I was still at the mantelpiece, now looking at the framed pictures.

"Hasn't got that bad yet, but . . . you know four of the j.a.panese islands are gone, right?"

I looked at him with dismay. "No."

"Three were small ones, but Hokkaido's gone, too. Dropped into the G.o.ddam ocean four years ago like it was on an elevator. The scientists say it's got something to do with the earth's crust." Matter-of-factly he added: "They say if it don't stop, it'll tear the planet apart by 2080 or so. Then the solar system'll have two asteroid belts."

I drank the rest of my whisky in a single gulp, and the crocodile tears of booze momentarily doubled my vision. When the room solidified again, I pointed to a picture of Harry at about fifty. He was still in his wheelchair, but he looked hale and healthy, at least from the waist up; the legs of his suit pants billowed over his diminished legs. Next to him was a woman in a pink dress that reminded me of Jackie Kennedy's suit on 11/22/63. I remember my mother telling me never to call a woman who wasn't beautiful "plain-faced"; they were, she said, "good-faced." This woman was good-faced.

"Your wife?"

"Ayuh. That was taken on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She died two years later. There's a lot of that going around. The politicians will tell you the A-bombs did it-been twenty-eight or-nine swapped since Hanoi h.e.l.l in '69. They'll swear it until they're blue in the face, but everyone knows the sores and the cancer didn't start getting really bad up this way until Vermont Yankee went China Syndrome. That happened after years of protests about the place. 'Oh,' they said, 'there won't be any big earthquakes in Vermont, not way up here in G.o.d's Kingdom, just the usual little shakers and poppers.' Yeah. Look what happened."

"You're saying a reactor blew up in Vermont."

"Spewed radiation all over New England and southern Quebec."

"When?"

"Jake, are you pulling my leg?"

"Absolutely not."

"June nineteenth, 1999."

"I'm sorry about your wife."

"Thank you, son. She was a good woman. Lovely woman. She didn't deserve what she got." He wiped his arm slowly across his eyes. "Been a long time since I talked about her, but then, it's been a long time since I've had anyone to talk with. Can I pour you a little more of this joy-juice?"

I held my fingers a smidge apart. I didn't expect to be here long; I had to take in all this bogus history, this darkness, in a hurry. I had a lot to do, not least of all bringing my own lovely woman back to life. That would mean another chat with the Green Card Man. I didn't want to be loaded when I had it, but one more little one wouldn't hurt. I needed it. My emotions felt frozen, which was probably good, because my mind was reeling.

"Were you paralyzed during the Tet Offensive?" Thinking, Of course you were, but it could have been worse; on the last go-round you died.

He looked blank for a moment, then his face cleared. "I guess it was Tet, come to think of it. We just called it the Great Saigon f.u.c.k-All of 1967. The helicopter I was in crashed. I was lucky. Most of the people on that bird died. Some of em were diplomats, and some of them were just kids."

"Tet of '67," I said. "Not '68."

"That's right. You wouldn't have been born, but surely you read about it in the history books."

"No." I let him pour a little more scotch into my gla.s.s-just enough to cover the bottom-and said, "I know that President Kennedy was almost a.s.sa.s.sinated in November of 1963. After that I know nothing."

He shook his head. "That's the funniest case of amnesia I ever heard of."

"Was Kennedy reelected?"

"Against Goldwater? You bet your a.s.s he was."

"Did he keep Johnson as his running mate?"

"Sure. Kennedy needed Texas. Got it, too. Governor Connally worked like a slave for him in that election, much as he despised Kennedy's New Frontier. They called it the Embarra.s.sment Endors.e.m.e.nt. Because of what almost happened that day in Dallas. You sure you don't know this? Never learned any of it in school?"

"You lived it, Harry. So tell me."

"I don't mind," he said. "Drag up a rock, son. Quit lookin at those pictures. If you don't know Kennedy got reelected in '64, you're sure not apt to know any of my family."

Ah, Harry, I thought.

3.

When I was just a little kid-four, maybe even three-a drunk uncle told me the story of "Little Red Riding Hood." Not the one in the standard fairy-tale books, but the R-rated version, full of screams, blood, and the dull thump of the woodsman's axe. My memory of hearing it is vivid to this day, but only a few of the details remain: the wolf's teeth bared in a s.h.i.+ning grin, for instance, and the gore-soaked granny being reborn from the wolf's yawning belly. This is my way of saying that if you're expecting The Concise Alternate History of the World as told by Harry Dunning to Jake Epping, forget about it. It wasn't just the horror of discovering how badly things had gone wrong. It was my need to get back and put things right.

Yet a few things stand out. The worldwide search for George Amberson, for instance. No joy there-George was as gone as Judge Crater-but in the forty-eight years since the a.s.sa.s.sination attempt in Dallas, Amberson had become a near-mythical figure. Savior, or part of the plot? People held actual conventions to discuss it, and listening to Harry tell that part, it was impossible for me not to think of all the conspiracy theories that had sprung up around the version of Lee who had succeeded. As we know, cla.s.s, the past harmonizes.

Kennedy expected to sweep Barry Goldwater away in a landslide in '64; instead he won by less than forty electoral votes, a margin only Democratic Party stalwarts thought respectable. Early in his second term, he infuriated both the right-wing voters and the military establishment by declaring North Vietnam "less a danger to our democracy than the racial inequality in our schools and cities." He didn't withdraw American troops entirely, but they were restricted to Saigon and a ring around it that was called-surprise, surprise-the Green Zone. Instead of injecting large numbers of troops, the second Kennedy administration injected large amounts of money. It's the American Way.

The great civil rights reforms of the sixties never happened. Kennedy was no LBJ, and as vice president, Johnson was uniquely powerless to help him. The Republicans and Dixiecrats filibustered for a hundred and ten days; one actually died on the floor and became a right-wing hero. When Kennedy finally gave up, he made an off-the-cuff remark that would haunt him until he died in 1983: "White America has filled its house with kindling; now it will burn."

The race riots came next. While Kennedy was preoccupied with them, the North Vietnamese armies overran Saigon-and the man who'd gotten me into this was paralyzed in a helicopter crash on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. Public opinion began to swing heavily against JFK.

A month after the fall of Saigon, Martin Luther King was a.s.sa.s.sinated in Chicago. The a.s.sa.s.sin turned out to be a rogue FBI agent named Dwight Holly. Before being killed himself, he claimed to have carried out the hit on Hoover's orders. Chicago went up in flames. So did a dozen other American cities.

George Wallace was elected president. By then the earthquakes had begun in earnest. Wallace couldn't do anything about those, so he settled for firebombing Chicago into submission. That, Harry said, was in June of 1969. A year later, President Wallace offered Ho Chi Minh an ultimatum: make Saigon a free city like Berlin or see Hanoi become a dead one, like Hiros.h.i.+ma. Uncle Ho refused. If he thought Wallace was bluffing, he was wrong. Hanoi became a radioactive cloud on August ninth, 1969, twenty-four years to the day after Harry Truman dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Vice President Curtis LeMay took personal charge of the mission. In a speech to the nation, Wallace called it G.o.d's will. Most Americans concurred. Wallace's approval ratings were high, but there was at least one fellow who did not approve. His name was Arthur Bremer, and on May fifteenth, 1972, he shot Wallace dead as Wallace campaigned for reelection at a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland.

"With what kind of gun?"

"I believe it was a .38 revolver."

Sure it was. Maybe a Police Special, but probably a Victory model, the same kind of gun that had taken Officer Tippit's life along another time-string.

This was where I began to lose the thread. Where the thought I have to put this right, put this right, put this right began to hammer in my head like a gong.

Hubert Humphrey became president in '72. The earthquakes worsened. The world suicide rate skyrocketed. Fundamentalism of all kinds blossomed. The terrorism fomented by religious extremists blossomed with it. India and Pakistan went to war; more mushroom clouds bloomed. Bombay never became Mumbai. What it became was radioactive ash in a cancer-wind.

Likewise, Karachi. Only when Russia, China, and the United States promised to bomb both countries back to the Stone Age did the hostilities cease.

In 1976, Humphrey lost to Ronald Reagan in a coast-to-coast landslide; The Hump couldn't hold even his native state of Minnesota.

Two thousand committed ma.s.s suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.

In November of 1979, Iranian students overran the American emba.s.sy in Tehran and took not sixty-six hostages but over two hundred. Heads rolled on Iranian TV. Reagan had learned enough from Hanoi h.e.l.l to keep the nukes in their bomb bays and missile silos, but he sent in beaucoup troops. The remaining hostages were, of course, slaughtered, and an emerging terrorist group calling themselves The Base-or, in Arabic, Al-Qaeda-began planting roadside bombs here, there, and everywhere.

"The man could speechify like a motherf.u.c.ker, but he had no understanding of militant Islam," Harry said.

The Beatles reunited and played a Peace Concert. A suicide bomber in the crowd detonated his vest and killed three hundred spectators. Paul McCartney was blinded.

The Mideast went up in flames shortly thereafter.

Russia collapsed.

Some group-probably exiled Russian hard-line fanatics-began selling nuclear weapons to terrorist groups, including The Base.

"By 1994," Harry said in his dry voice, "the oil fields over there were so much black gla.s.s. The kind that glows in the dark. Since then, though, the terrorism has kind of burned itself out. Someone blew up a suitcase nuke in Miami two years ago, but it didn't work very well. I mean, it'll be sixty or eighty years before anybody can party on South Beach-and of course the Gulf of Mexico is basically dead soup-but only ten thousand people have died of radiation poisoning. By then it wasn't our problem. Maine voted to become a part of Canada, and President Clinton was happy to say good riddance."