Chapter 30
I stepped off my final Greyhound at the Minot Avenue station in Auburn, Maine, at a little past noon on the twenty-sixth of November.
After more than eighty hours of almost nonstop riding, relieved only by short intervals of sleep, I felt like a figment of my own imagination.
It was cold. God was clearing His throat and spitting casual snow from a dirty gray sky.
I had bought some jeans and a couple of blue chambray workshirts to replace the kitchen-whites, but such clothes weren’t nearly enough.
I had forgotten the Maine weather during my time in Texas, but my body remembered in a hurry and started to shiver.
I made Louie’s for Men my first stop, where I found a sheepskin-lined coat in my size and took it to the clerk.
He put down his copy of the Lewiston Sun to wait on me, and I saw my picture—yes, the one from the DCHS yearbook—on the front page.
WHERE IS GEORGE AMBERSON? the headline demanded.
The clerk rang up the sale and scribbled me a receipt.
I tapped my picture. “What in the world do you suppose is up with that guy?”
The clerk looked at me and shrugged. “He doesn’t want the publicity and I don’t blame him. I love my wife a whole darn bunch, and if she died sudden, I wouldn’t want people taking my picture for the papers or putting my weepy mug on TV. Would you?”
“No,” I said, “I guess not.”
“If I were that guy, I wouldn’t come up for air until 1970. Let the ruckus die down. How about a nice cap to go with that coat? I got some flannel ones that just came in yesterday. The earflaps are good and thick.”
So I bought a cap to go with my new coat.
Then I limped the two blocks back to the bus station, swinging my suitcase at the end of my good arm.
Part of me wanted to go to Lisbon Falls right that minute and make sure the rabbit-hole was still there.
But if it was, I’d use it, I wouldn’t be able to resist, and after five years in the Land of Ago, the rational part of me knew I wasn’t ready for the full-on assault of what had become, in my mind, the Land of Ahead.
I needed some rest first. Real rest, not dozing in a bus seat while little kids wailed and tipsy men laughed.
There were four or five taxis parked at the curb, in snow that was now swirling instead of just spitting.
I got into the first one, relishing the warm breath from the heater.
The cabbie turned around, a fat guy with a badge reading LICENSED LIVERY on his battered cap.
He was a complete stranger to me, but I knew that when he turned on the radio, it would be tuned to WJAB out of Portland, and when he dragged his ciggies out of his breast pocket, they would be Lucky Strikes. What goes around comes around.
“Where to, chief?”
I told him to take me to the Tamarack Motor Court, out on 196.
“You got it.”
He turned on the radio and got the Miracles, singing “Mickey’s Monkey.”
“These modern dances!” he grunted, grabbing his smokes. “They don’t do nothing but teach the kids how to bump n wiggle.”
“Dancing is life,” I said.
2
It was a different desk clerk, but she gave me the same room.
Of course she did. The rate was a little higher and the old TV had been replaced by a newer one, but the same sign was propped against the rabbit ears on top: DO NOT USE “TINFOIL!” The reception was still shitty. There was no news, only soap operas.
I turned it off. I put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.
I drew the curtains. Then I stripped and crawled into bed, where—aside from a dreamlike stumble to the bathroom to relieve my bladder—I slept for twelve hours.
When I woke up, it was the middle of the night, the power was off, and a strong northwest wind was blowing outside.
A brilliant crescent moon rode high in the sky.
I got the extra blanket from the closet and slept for another five hours.
When I woke up, dawn lit the Tamarack Motor Court with the clear hues and shadows of a National Geographic photograph.
There was frost on the cars pulled up in front of a scattering of units, and I could see my breath.
I tried the phone, expecting nothing, but a young man in the office answered promptly, although he sounded as if he were still half-asleep.
Sure, he said, the phones were fine and he’d be happy to call me a taxi—where did I want to go?
Lisbon Falls, I told him. Corner of Main Street and the Old Lewiston Road.
“The Fruit?” he asked.
I’d been away so long that for a moment it seemed like a total non sequitur. Then it clicked. “That’s right. The Kennebec Fruit.”
Going home, I told myself. God help me, I’m going home.
Only that was wrong—2011 wasn’t home, and I would only be staying there a short time—assuming, that was, I could get there at all.
Perhaps only minutes. Jodie was home now.
Or would be, once Sadie arrived there. Sadie the virgin.
Sadie with her long legs and long hair and her propensity to trip over anything that might be in the way…
only at the critical moment, I was the one who had taken the fall.
Sadie, with her unmarked face.
She was home.
3
That morning’s taxi driver was a solidly built woman in her fifties, bundled into an old black parka and wearing a Red Sox hat instead of one with a badge reading LICENSED LIVERY.
As we turned left onto 196, in the direction of The Falls, she said: “D’ja hear the news?
I bet you didn’t—the power’s off up this way, ennit? ”
“What news is that?” I asked, although a dreadful certainty had already stolen into my bones: Kennedy was dead. I didn’t know if it had been an accident, a heart attack, or an assassination after all, but he was dead. The past was obdurate and Kennedy was dead.
“Earthquake in Los Angeles.” She pronounced it Las Angle-ees.
“People been sayin for years that California was just gonna drop off into the ocean, and it seems like maybe they’re gonna turn out to be right.
” She shook her head. “I ain’t gonna say it’s because of the loose way they live—those movie stars and all—but I’m a pretty good Baptist, and I ain’t gonna say it’s not. ”
We were passing the Lisbon Drive-In now. CLOSED FOR THE SEASON, the marquee read. SEE YOU WITH LOTS MORE IN ’64!
“How bad was it?”
“They’re saying seven thousand dead, but when you hear a number like that, you know it’ll go higher.
Most of the damn bridges fell down, the freeways are in pieces, and there’s fires everywhere.
Seems like the part of town where the Negroes live has pretty much burnt flat.
Warts! Ain’t that a hell of a name for a part of a town?
I mean, even one where black folks live? Warts! Huh!”
I didn’t reply. I was thinking of Rags, the puppy we’d had when I was nine, and still living in Wisconsin.
I was allowed to play with him in the backyard on school mornings until the bus came.
I was teaching him to sit, fetch, roll over, stuff like that, and he was learning—smart puppy! I loved him a lot.
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 ever forgetting to 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. Because she had 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 always had. 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 always had been 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 seven thousand 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 so soon?
No way. Absolutely not. There was no conceivable chain of cause and effect between the two events.