11/22/63: A Novel (9 page)

“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.”

“How sure are you that he did it? Because there are about a thousand conspiracy theories. Even I know that. What if I went back and stopped him and some other guy popped Kennedy from the Grassy Hill, or whatever it was?”

“Grassy Knoll. And I’m close to positive it was all Oswald. The conspiracy theories were all pretty crazy to begin with, and most of them have been disproved over the years. The idea that the shooter wasn’t Oswald at all, but someone who looked like him, for instance. The body was exhumed in 1981 and DNA tested. It was him, all right. The poisonous little fuck.” He paused, then added: “I met him, you know.”

I stared at him. “Bullshit!”

“Oh yes. He spoke to me. This was in Fort Worth. He and Marina—his wife, she was Russian—were visiting Oswald’s brother in Fort Worth. If Lee ever loved anybody, it was his brother Bobby. I was standing outside the picket fence around Bobby Oswald’s yard, leaning against a phone pole, smoking a cigarette and pretending to read the paper. My heart was hammering what felt like two hundred beats a minute. Lee and Marina came out together. She was carrying their daughter, June. Just a mite of a thing, less than a year old. The kid was asleep. Ozzie was wearing khaki pants and a button-down Ivy League shirt that was all frayed around the collar. The slacks had a sharp crease, but they were dirty. He’d given up his Marine cut, but his hair would still have been way too short to grab. Marina—holy Christ, what a knockout! Dark hair, bright blue eyes, flawless skin. She looks like a goddam movie star. If you do this, you’ll see for yourself. She said
something to him in Russian as they came down the walk. He said something back. He was smiling when he said it, but then he pushed her. She almost fell over. The kid woke up and started to cry. All this time, Oswald kept smiling.”

“You saw this. You actually did. You saw
him.
” In spite of my own trip back in time, I was at least half-convinced that this had to be either a delusion or an outright lie.

“I did. She came out through the gate and walked past me with her head down, holding the baby against her breasts. Like I wasn’t there. But he walked right up to me, close enough for me to smell the Old Spice he was wearing to try and cover up the smell of his sweat. There were blackheads all over his nose. You could tell looking at his clothes—and his shoes, which were scuffed and busted down at the backs—that he didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, but when you looked in his face, you knew that didn’t matter. Not to him, it didn’t. He thought he was a big deal.”

Al considered briefly, then shook his head.

“No, I take that back. He
knew
he was a big deal. It was just a matter of waiting for the rest of the world to catch up on that. So there he is, in my face—choking distance, and don’t think the idea didn’t cross my mind—”

“Why didn’t you? Or just cut to the chase and shoot him?”

“In front of his wife and baby? Could you do that, Jake?”

I didn’t have to consider it for long. “Guess not.”

“Me either. I had other reasons, too. One of them was an aversion to state prison . . . or the electric chair. We were out on the street, remember.”

“Ah.”

“Ah is right. He still had that little smile on his face when he walked up to me. Arrogant and prissy, both at the same time. He’s wearing that smile in just about every photograph anybody ever took of him. He’s wearing it in the Dallas police station after they arrested him for killing the president and a motor patrolman who happened to cross his path when he was trying to get away. He says to me, ‘What are you looking at, sir?’ I say ‘Nothing, buddy.’ And he says, ‘Then mind your beeswax.’

“Marina was waiting for him maybe twenty feet down the
sidewalk, trying to soothe the baby back to sleep. It was hotter than hell that day, but she was wearing a kerchief over her hair, the way lots of European women do back then. He went to her and grabbed her elbow—like a cop instead of her husband—and says,
‘Pokhoda! Pokhoda!’
Walk, walk. She said something to him, maybe asking if he’d carry the baby for awhile. That’s my guess, anyway. But he just pushed her away and said,
‘Pokhoda, cyka!’
Walk, bitch. She did. They went off down toward the bus stop. And that was it.”

“You speak Russian?”

“No, but I have a good ear and a computer. Back here I do, anyway.”

“You saw him other times?”

“Only from a distance. By then I was getting real sick.” He grinned. “There’s no Texas barbecue as good as Fort Worth barbecue, and I couldn’t eat it. It’s a cruel world, sometimes. I went to a doctor, got a diagnosis I could have made myself by then, and came back to the twenty-first century. Basically, there was nothing more to see, anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser waiting to be famous.”

He leaned forward.

“You know what the man who changed American history was like? He was the kind of kid who throws stones at other kids and then runs away. By the time he joined the Marines—to be like his brother Bobby, he idolized Bobby—he’d lived in almost two dozen different places, from New Orleans to New York City. He had big ideas and couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t listen to them. He was mad about that, furious, but he never lost that pissy, prissy little smile of his. Do you know what William Manchester called him?”

“No.” I didn’t even know who William Manchester was.

“A wretched waif. Manchester was talking about all the con
spiracy theories that bloomed in the aftermath of the assassination . . . and after Oswald himself was shot and killed. I mean, you know that, right?”

“Of course,” I said, a little annoyed. “A guy named Jack Ruby did it.” But given the holes in my knowledge I’d already demonstrated, I suppose he had a right to wonder.

“Manchester said that if you put the murdered president on one side of a scale and Oswald—the wretched waif—on the other, it didn’t balance. No way did it balance. If you wanted to give Kennedy’s death some meaning, you’d have to add something heavier. Which explains the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Like the Mafia did it—Carlos Marcello ordered the hit. Or the KGB did it. Or Castro, to get back at the CIA for trying to load him up with poison cigars. There are people to this day who believe Lyndon Johnson did it so he could be president. But in the end . . .” Al shook his head. “It was almost certainly Oswald. You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor, haven’t you?”

It was nice to know something for sure. “It’s a basic truism sometimes known as the law of parsimony. ‘All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.’ So why didn’t you kill him when he
wasn’t
on the street with his wife and kid? You were a Marine, too. When you knew how sick you were, why didn’t you just kill the little motherfucker yourself ?”

“Because being ninety-five percent sure isn’t a hundred. Because, shithead or not, he was a family man. Because after he was arrested, Oswald said he was a patsy and I wanted to be sure he was lying. I don’t think anybody can ever be a hundred percent sure of anything in this wicked world, but I wanted to get up to ninety-eight. I had no intention of waiting until November twenty-second and then stopping him at the Texas School Book Depository, though—that would have been cutting it way too fine, for one big reason I’ll have to tell you about.”

His eyes no longer looked so bright, and the lines on his face were deepening again. I was scared by how shallow his reserves of strength had become.

“I’ve written all this stuff down. I want you to read it. Actually,
I want you to cram like a bastard. Look on top of the TV, buddy. Would you do that?” He gave me a tired smile and added, “I got my sittin-britches on.”

It was a thick blue notebook. The price stamped on the paper cover was twenty-five cents. The brand was foreign to me. “What’s Kresge’s?”

“The department store chain now known as Kmart. Never mind what’s on the cover, just pay attention to what’s inside. It’s an Oswald timeline, plus all the evidence piled up against him . . . which you don’t really have to read if you take me up on this, because you’re going to stop the little weasel in April of 1963, over half a year before Kennedy comes to Dallas.”