When the bus came, I was supposed to close the backyard gate before I ran to get on board. Rags always lay down on the kitchen stoop. My mother would call him in and feed him breakfast after she got back from taking my dad to the local train station. I always remembered to close the gate—or at least, I don’t remember everforgettingto do it—but one day when I came home from school, my mother told me Rags was dead. He’d been in the street and a delivery truck had run him down. She never reproached me with her mouth, not once, but she reproached me with her eyes. Becauseshehad loved Rags, too.
“I closed him in like always,” I said through my tears, and—as I say—I believe that I did. Maybe because I alwayshad.That evening my dad and I buried him in the backyard.Probably not legal,Dad said,but I won’t tell if you won’t.
I lay awake for a long, long time that night, haunted by what I couldn’t remember and terrified of what I might have done. Not to mention guilty. That guilt lingered a long time, a year or more. If I could have remembered for sure, one way or the other, I’m positive it would have left me more quickly. But I couldn’t. Had I shut the gate, or hadn’t I? Again and again I cast my mind to my puppy’s final morning and could remember nothing clearly except heaving his rawhide strip and yelling, “Fetch, Rags, fetch!”
It was like that on my taxi ride to The Falls. First I tried to tell myself that there alwayshadbeen an earthquake in late November of 1963. It was just one of those factoids—like the attempted assassination of Edwin Walker—that I had missed. As I’d told Al Templeton I majored in English, not history.
It wouldn’t wash. If an earthquake like that had happened in the America I’d lived in before going down the rabbit-hole, I would have known. There were far bigger disasters—the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 killed over two hundred thousand—but seventhousand was a big number for America, more than twice as many fatalities as had occurred on 9/11.
Next I asked myself how what I’d done in Dallas could possibly have caused what this sturdy woman claimed had happened in LA. The only answer I could come up with was the butterfly effect, but how could it kick into gear sosoon? No way. Absolutely not. There was no conceivable chain of cause and effect between the two events.
And still a deep part of my mind whispered,You did this. You caused Rags’s death by either leaving the backyard gate open or not closing it firmly enough to latch… and you caused this. You and Al spouted a lot of noble talk about saving thousands of lives in Vietnam, but this is your first real contribution to the New History: seven thousand dead in LA.
It simply couldn’t be. Even if it was….
There’s no downside,Al had said.If things turn to shit, you just take it all back. Easy as erasing a dirty word off a chalkb—
“Mister?” my driver said. “We’re here.” She turned to look at me curiously. “We’ve been here for almost three minutes. Little early for shopping, though. Are you sure this is where you want to be?”
I only knew this was where Ihadto be. I paid what was on the meter, added a generous tip (it was the FBI’s money, after all), wished her a nice day, and got out.
4
Lisbon Falls was as stinky as ever, but at least the power was on; the blinker at the intersection was flashing as it swung in the northwest wind. The Kennebec Fruit was dark, the front window still empty of the apples, oranges, and bananas that would be displayed there later on. The sign hanging in the door of the greenfront read WILL OPEN AT 10 A.M. A few cars moved on Main Street and a few pedestrians scuttled along with their collars turned up. Across the street, however, the Worumbo mill was fully operational. Icould hear theshat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSHof the weaving flats even from where I was standing. Then I heard something else: someone was calling me, although not by either of my names.
“Jimla! Hey, Jimla!”
I turned toward the mill, thinking:He’s back. The Yellow Card Man is back from the dead, just like President Kennedy.
Only it wasn’t the Yellow Card Man any more than the taxi driver who’d picked me up at the bus station was the same one who’d taken me from Lisbon Falls to the Tamarack Motor Court in 1958. Except the two drivers werealmostthe same, because the past harmonizes, and the man across the street was similar to the one who’d asked me for a buck because it was double-money day at the greenfront. He was a lot younger than the Yellow Card Man, and his black overcoat was newer and cleaner… but it wasalmostthe same coat.
“Jimla! Over here!” He beckoned. The wind flapped the hem of the overcoat; it made the sign to his left swing on its chain the way the blinker was swinging on its wire. I could still read it, though:NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED.
Five years,I thought,and that pesky sewer pipe’s still busted.
“Jimla! Don’t make me come over there and get you!”
He probably could; his suicidal predecessor had been able to make it all the way to the greenfront. But I felt sure that if I went limping down the Old Lewiston Road fast enough, this new version would be out of luck. He might be able to follow me to the Red & White Supermarket, where Al had bought his meat, but if I made it as far as Titus Chevron, or the Jolly White Elephant, I could turn around and thumb my nose at him. He was stuck near the rabbit-hole. If he hadn’t been, I would have seen him in Dallas. I knew it as surely as I knew that gravity keeps folks from floating into outer space.
As if to confirm this, he called, “Jimla,please!” The desperation I saw in his face was like the wind: thin but somehow relentless.
I looked both ways for traffic, saw none, and crossed the street towhere he stood. As I approached, I saw two other differences. Like his predecessor, he was wearing a fedora, but it was clean instead of filthy. And as with his predecessor, a colored card was poking up from the hatband like an old-fashioned reporter’s press pass. Only this one wasn’t yellow, or orange, or black.
It was green.
5
“Thank God,” he said. He took one of my hands in both of his and squeezed it. The flesh of his palms was almost as cold as the air. I pulled back from him, but gently. I sensed no danger about him, only that thin and insistent desperation. Although that in itself might be dangerous; it might be as keen as the blade of the knife John Clayton had used on Sadie’s face.
“Who are you?” I asked. “And why do you call me Jimla? Jim LaDue is a long way from here, mister.”
“I don’t know who Jim LaDue is,” the Green Card Man said. “I’ve stayed away from your string as much as—”
He stopped. His face contorted. The sides of his hands rose to his temples and pressed there, as if to hold his brains in. But it was the card stuck in the band of his hat that captured most of my attention. The color wasn’t entirely fixed. For a moment it swirled and swam, reminding me of the screensaver that takes over my computer after it’s been idle for fifteen minutes or so. The green swirled into a pale canary yellow. Then, as he slowly lowered his hands, it returned to green. But maybe not as bright a green as when I’d first noticed it.
“I’ve stayed away from your string as much as possible,” the man in the black overcoat said, “but it hasn’t beenentirelypossible. Besides, there are somanystrings now. Thanks to you and your friend the cook, there’s so muchcrap.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” I said, but that wasn’t quite true. I could at least figure out the card this man (and his wet-brain forerunner) carried. They were like the badges worn by people who worked in nuclear power plants. Only instead of measuring radiation, the cards monitored… what? Sanity? Green, your bag of marbles was full. Yellow, you’d started to lose them. Orange, call for the men in the white coats. And when your card turned black…
