Chapter 3 #2
“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 assassinations—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 pronounal assumptions 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 pushing 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, God 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 butterfly 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 bumper cars at an amusement park.
Finally it abated. He glanced at the pad, winced, folded it up, and threw it away.
“Sorry, buddy. This oral menstruation’s a bitch.”
“Jesus, Al!”
He shrugged. “If you can’t joke about it, what’s the point of anything? Now where was I?”
“Butterfly effect.”
“Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly 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 hoary 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 fuck 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 butterfly 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 Ambassador 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 butterfly 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-class 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 assassination 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 assassinate 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 assassination 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-balls-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 shit, 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.”
“Bullshit. 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 assassination and about Oswald.”
“Everything I could get my hands on, buddy.”