Chapter 30 #2
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 I had to 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.
I could hear the shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH of 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 were almost the 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 was almost the 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 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 been entirely possible. Besides, there are so many strings now. Thanks to you and your friend the cook, there’s so much crap.”
“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…
The Green Card Man was watching me carefully. From across the street he’d looked no older than thirty. Over here, he looked closer to forty-five. Only, when you got close enough to look into his eyes, he looked older than the ages and not right in the head.
“Are you some kind of guardian? Do you guard the rabbit-hole?”
He smiled… or tried to. “That’s what your friend called it.” From his pocket he took a pack of cigarettes. There was no label on them. That was something I’d never seen before, either here in the Land of Ago or in the Land of Ahead.
“Is this the only one?”
He produced a lighter, cupped it to keep the wind from blowing the flame out, then set fire to the end of his cigarette.
The smell was sweet, more like marijuana than tobacco.
But it wasn’t marijuana. Although he never said, I believe it was something medicinal.
Perhaps not so different from my Goody’s Headache Powder.
“There are a few. Think of a glass of ginger ale that’s been left out and forgotten.”
“Okay…”
“After two or three days, almost all the carbonation is gone, but there are still a few bubbles left. What you call the rabbit-hole isn’t a hole at all.
It’s a bubble. As far as guarding… no. Not really.
It would be nice, but there’s very little we could do that wouldn’t make things worse.
That’s the trouble with traveling in time, Jimla. ”
“My name is Jake.”
“Fine. What we do, Jake, is watch. Sometimes we warn. As Kyle tried to warn your friend the cook.”
So the crazy guy had a name. A perfectly normal one. Kyle, for God’s sake. It made things worse because it made them more real.
“He never tried to warn Al! All he ever did was ask for a buck to buy cheap wine with!”
The Green Card Man dragged on his cigarette and looked down at the cracked concrete, frowning as if something were written there.
Shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH said the weaving flats.
“He did at first,” he said. “In his way. Your friend was too excited by the new world he’d found to pay attention.
And by then Kyle was already tottering. It’s a…
how would you put it? An occupational hazard.
What we do puts us under enormous mental strain. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“Think a minute. How many little explorations and shopping trips did your cook friend make even before he got the idea of going to Dallas to stop Oswald? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?”
I tried to remember how long Al’s Diner had stood in the mill courtyard and couldn’t. “Probably even more than that.”
“And what did he tell you? Each trip was the first time?”
“Yes. A complete reset.”
He laughed wearily. “Sure he did. People believe what they see. And still, he should have known better. You should have known better. Each trip creates its own string, and when you have enough strings, they always get snarled. Did it ever cross your friend’s mind to wonder how he could buy the same meat over and over?
Or why things he brought from 1958 never disappeared when he made the next trip? ”
“I asked him about that. He didn’t know, so he dismissed it.”
He started to smile, but it turned into a wince.
The green once more started to fade out of the card stuck in his hat.
He dragged deep on his sweet-smelling cigarette.
The color returned and steadied. “Yeah, ignoring the obvious. It’s what we all do.
Even after his sanity began to totter, Kyle undoubtedly knew that his trips to yonder liquor store were making his condition worse, but he went on, regardless.
I don’t blame him; I’m sure the wine eased his pain.
Especially toward the end. Things might have been better if he hadn’t been able to get to the liquor store—if it was outside the circle—but it wasn’t.
And really, who can say? There is no blaming here, Jake. No condemnation.”