Chapter 7 #3
When the last plane of the night skimmed over the rooftop at twelve-thirty, I was still awake and thinking of my list. Telling the police was out.
It might work with Oswald, who would declare his undying love for Fidel Castro in both Dallas and New Orleans, but Dunning was a different matter.
He was a well-liked and well-respected member of the community.
Who was I? The new guy in a town that didn’t like outsiders.
That afternoon, after coming out of the drugstore, I had once again seen No Suspenders and his crew outside the Sleepy Silver Dollar.
I was wearing my workingman clothes, but they had given me that same flat-eyed who the fuck’re you look.
Even if I’d been living in Derry for eight years instead of eight days, just what would I say to the police, anyway? That I’d had a vision of Frank Dunning killing his family on Halloween night? That would certainly go over well.
I liked the idea of placing an anonymous call to the butcher himself a little better, but it was a scary option.
Once I called Frank Dunning—either at work or at Edna Price’s, where he would no doubt be summoned to the communal phone in the parlor—I would have changed events.
Such a call might stop him from killing his family, but I thought it just as likely it would have the opposite effect, tipping him over the precarious edge of sanity he must be walking behind the affable George Clooney smile.
Instead of preventing the murders, I might only succeed in making them happen sooner.
As it was, I knew where and when. If I warned him, all bets were off.
Frame him for something? It might work in a spy novel, but I wasn’t a CIA agent; I was a goddam English teacher.
Incapacitate butcher was next on the list. Okay, but how?
Smack him with the Sunliner, maybe as he walked from Charity Avenue to Kossuth Street with a hammer in his hand and murder on his mind?
Unless I had amazing luck, I’d be caught and jailed.
There was this, too. Incapacitated people usually get better.
He might try again once he did. As I lay there in the dark, I found that scenario all too plausible.
Because the past didn’t like to be changed. It was obdurate.
The only sure way was to follow him, wait until he was alone, and then kill him. Keep it simple, stupid.
But there were problems with this, too. The biggest was that I didn’t know if I could go through with it. I thought I could in hot blood—to protect myself or another—but in cold blood? Even if I knew that my potential victim was going to kill his own wife and children if he weren’t stopped?
And… what if I did it and then got caught before I could escape to the future where I was Jake Epping instead of George Amberson? I’d be tried, found guilty, sent to Shawshank State Prison. And that was where I’d be on the day John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.
Even that wasn’t the absolute bottom of the matter.
I got up, paced through the kitchen to my phone booth of a bathroom, went to the toilet, then sat on the seat with my forehead propped on the heels of my palms. I had assumed Harry’s essay was the truth.
Al had, too. It probably was, because Harry was two or three degrees on the dim side of normal, and people like that are less liable to try passing off fantasies like the murder of an entire family as reality. Still…
Ninety-five percent probability isn’t a hundred, Al had said, and that was Oswald himself he’d been talking about. Just about the only person the killer could have been, once you set aside all the conspiracy babble, and yet Al still had those last lingering doubts.
It would have been easy to check out Harry’s story in the computer-friendly world of 2011, but I never had.
And even if it was completely true, there might be crucial details he’d gotten wrong or not mentioned at all.
Things that could trip me up. What if, instead of riding to the rescue like Sir Galahad, I only managed to get killed along with them?
That would change the future in all sorts of interesting ways, but I wouldn’t be around to discover what they were.
A new idea popped into my head, one that was crazily attractive.
I could station myself across from 379 Kossuth on Halloween night…
and just watch. To make sure it really happened, yes, but also to note all the details the only living witness—a traumatized child—might have missed.
Then I could drive back to Lisbon Falls, go up through the rabbit-hole, and immediately return to September 9 at 11:58 in the morning.
I’d buy the Sunliner again and go to Derry again, this time loaded with information.
It was true I’d already spent a fair amount of Al’s currency, but there was enough left to get by on.
The idea ran well out of the gate but stumbled before it even got to the first turn.
The whole purpose of this trip had been to find out what effect saving the janitor’s family would have on the future, and if I let Frank Dunning go through with the murders, I wouldn’t know.
And I was already faced with having to do this again, because there would be one of those resets when—if—I went back through the rabbit-hole to stop Oswald.
Once was bad. Twice would be worse. Three times was unthinkable.
And one other thing. Harry Dunning’s family had already died once. Was I going to condemn them to die a second time? Even if each time was a reset and they didn’t know? And who was to say that on some deep level they didn’t?
The pain. The blood. Li’l Carrot-Top lying on the floor under the rocker. Harry trying to scare the lunatic off with a Daisy air gun: “Leave me alone, Daddy, or I’ll shoot you.”
I shuffled back through the kitchen, pausing to look at the chair with the yellow plastic seat. “I hate you, chair,” I told it, then went to bed again.
That time I fell asleep almost immediately. When I woke up the next morning, a nine-o’clock sun was shining in my as-yet-curtainless bedroom window, birds were twittering self-importantly, and I thought I knew what I had to do. Keep it simple, stupid.
6
At noon I put on my tie, set my straw hat at the correct rakish angle, and took myself down to Machen’s Sporting Goods, where THE FALL GUN SALE was still going on.
I told the clerk I was interested in buying a handgun, because I was in the real estate business and occasionally I had to carry quite large amounts of cash.
He showed me several, including a Colt .
38 Police Special revolver. The price was $9.
99. That seemed absurdly low until I remembered that, according to Al’s notes, the Italian mail-order rifle Oswald had used to change history had cost less than twenty.
“This is a fine piece of protection,” the clerk said, rolling out the barrel and giving it a spin: clickclickclickclick. “Dead accurate up to fifteen yards, guaranteed, and anyone stupid enough to try mugging you out of your cash is going to be a lot closer than that.”
“Sold.”
I braced for an examination of my scant paperwork, but had once again forgotten to take into account the relaxed and unterrified atmosphere of the America where I was now living.
The way the deal worked was this: I paid my money and walked out with the gun.
There was no paperwork and no waiting period.
I didn’t even have to give my current address.
Oswald had wrapped his gun in a blanket and hidden it in the garage of the house where his wife was staying with a woman named Ruth Paine.
But when I walked out of Machen’s with mine in my briefcase, I thought I knew how he must have felt: like a man with a powerful secret.
A man who owned his own private tornado.
A guy who should have been at work in one of the mills was standing in the doorway of the Sleepy Silver Dollar, smoking a cigarette and reading the paper. Appearing to read the paper, at least. I couldn’t swear he was watching me, but then again I couldn’t swear he wasn’t.
It was No Suspenders.
7
That evening, I once more took up a position close to The Strand, where the marquee read OPENS TOMORROW! THUNDER ROAD (MITCHUM) I knew where he was going.
I walked back to my new apartment, looking around every now and then for No Suspenders.
There was no sign of him, and I told myself that seeing him across from the sporting goods store had just been a coincidence.
Not a big one, either. The Sleepy was his joint of choice, after all.
Because the Derry mills ran six days a week, the workers had rotating off-days.
Thursday could have been one of this guy’s.
Next week he might be hanging at the Sleepy on Friday. Or Tuesday.
The following evening I was once more at The Strand, pretending to study the poster for Thunder Road (Robert Mitchum Roars Down the Hottest Highway on Earth!), mostly because I had nowhere else to go; Halloween was still six weeks away, and I seemed to have entered the time-killing phase of our program.
But this time instead of crossing to the bus stop, Frank Dunning walked down to the three-way intersection of Center, Kansas, and Witcham and stood there as if undecided.
He was once more looking reet in dark slacks, white shirt, blue tie, and a sport coat in a light gray windowpane check.
His hat was cocked back on his head. For a moment I thought he was going to head for the movies and check out the hottest highway on earth, in which case I would stroll casually away toward Canal Street.
But he turned left, onto Witcham. I could hear him whistling. He was a good whistler.