“Always,” Sadie said.
“Is it more likely to happen when he’s upset because he can’t remember something?”
Sadie agreed that it was.
“Then I’m quite sure it will pass, the way his amnesia is passing.”
At last—little by slowly—my inside world began to merge with the outside one. I was Jacob Epping, I was a teacher, and I had somehow traveled back in time to stop the assassination of President Kennedy. I tried to reject the idea at first, but I knew too much about the intervening years, and those things weren’t visions. They were memories. The Rolling Stones, the Clinton impeachment hearings, the World Trade Center in flames. Christy, my troubled and troublesome ex-wife.
One night while Sadie and I were watchingCombat,I remembered what I had done to Frank Dunning.
“Sadie, I killed a man before I came to Texas. It was in a graveyard. I had to. He was going to murder his whole family.”
She looked at me, eyes wide and mouth open.
“Turn off the TV,” I said. “The guy who plays Sergeant Saunders—can’t remember his name—is going to be decapitated by a helicopter blade. Please, Sadie, turn it off.”
She did, then knelt before me.
“Who’s going to kill Kennedy? Where is he going to be when he does it?”
I tried my hardest, and I didn’t fall asleep, but I couldn’t remember. I had gone from Maine to Florida, I remembered that. In the Ford Sunliner, a great car. I had gone from Florida to New Orleans, and when I left New Orleans, I’d come to Texas. I remembered listening to “Earth Angel” on the radio as I crossed the state line, doing seventy miles per hour on Highway 20. I remembered a sign:TEXAS WELCOMES YOU. And a billboard advertising SONNY’S B-B-Q, 27 MI. After that, a hole in the film. On the other side were emerging memories of teaching and living in Jodie. Brighter memories of swing-dancing with Sadie and lying in bed with her at the Candlewood Bungalows. Sadie told me I’d also lived in Fort Worth and Dallas, but she didn’t know where; all she had were two phone numbers that no longer worked. I didn’t know where, either, although I thought one of the places might have been on Cadillac Street. She checked roadmaps and said there was no Cadillac Street in either city.
I could remember a lot of things now, but not the assassin’s name, or where he was going to be when he made his try. And why not? Because the past was keeping it from me. The obdurate past.
“The assassin has a child,” I said. “I think her name is April.”
“Jake, I’m going to ask you something. It might make you mad, but since a lot depends on this—the fate of the world, according to you—I need to.”
“Go ahead.” I couldn’t think of anything she might ask that would make me angry.
“Are you lying to me?”
“No,” I said. It was true. Then.
“I told Deke we needed to call the police. He showed me a piece in theMorning Newsthat said there have already been two hundred death threats and tips about potential assassins. He says both the right-wingers from Dallas–Fort Worth and the left-wingers from San Antonio are trying to scare Kennedy out of Texas. He says the Dallas police are turning all the threats and tips over to the FBI and they’re doingnothing.He says the only person J. Edgar Hoover hates more than JFK is his brother Bobby.”
I didn’t much care who J. Edgar Hoover hated. “Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” she said, and sighed. “Is Vic Morrow really going to die?”
That was his name, sure. “He is.”
“MakingCombat?”
“No, a movie.”
She burst into tears. “Don’tyoudie, Jake—please. I only want you to get better.”
I had a lot of bad dreams. The locations varied—sometimes it was an empty street that looked like Main Street in Lisbon Falls, sometimes it was the graveyard where I’d shot Frank Dunning, sometimes it was the kitchen of Andy Cullum, the cribbage ace—but usually it was Al Templeton’s diner. We sat in a booth with the photos on his Town Wall of Celebrity looking down at us. Al was sick—dying—but his eyes were full of bright intensity.
“The Yellow Card Man’s the personification of the obdurate past,” Al said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Yes, I knew that.
“He thought you’d die from the beating, but you didn’t. He thought you’d die of the infections, but you didn’t. Now he’s walling off those memories—the vital ones—because he knows it’s his last hope of stopping you.”
“How can he? He’s dead.”
