I tried my hardest, and I didn’t fall asleep, but I couldn’t remember. I had gone from Maine to Florida, I remembered that. In the Ford Sunliner, a great car. I had gone from Florida to New Orleans, and when I left New Orleans, I’d come to Texas. I remembered listening to “Earth Angel” on the radio as I crossed the state line, doing seventy miles per hour on Highway 20. I remembered a sign: TEXAS WELCOMES YOU. And a billboard advertising SONNY’S B-B-Q, 27 MI. After that, a hole in the film. On the other side were emerging memories of teaching and living in Jodie. Brighter memories of swing-dancing with Sadie and lying in bed with her at the Candlewood Bungalows. Sadie told me I’d also lived in Fort Worth and Dallas, but she didn’t know where; all she had were two phone numbers that no longer worked. I didn’t know where, either, although I thought one of the places might have been on Cadillac Street. She checked roadmaps and said there was no Cadillac Street in either city.
I could remember a lot of things now, but not the assassin’s name, or where he was going to be when he made his try. And why not? Because the past was keeping it from me. The obdurate past.
“The assassin has a child,” I said. “I think her name is April.”
“Jake, I’m going to ask you something. It might make you mad, but since a lot depends on this — the fate of the world, according to you — I need to.”
“Go ahead.” I couldn’t think of anything she might ask that would make me angry.
“Are you lying to me?”
“No,” I said. It was true. Then.
“I told Deke we needed to call the police. He showed me a piece in the
I didn’t much care who J. Edgar Hoover hated. “Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” she said, and sighed. “Is Vic Morrow really going to die?”
That was his name, sure. “He is.”
“Making
“No, a movie.”
She burst into tears. “Don’t
I had a lot of bad dreams. The locations varied — sometimes it was an empty street that looked like Main Street in Lisbon Falls, sometimes it was the graveyard where I’d shot Frank Dunning, sometimes it was the kitchen of Andy Cullum, the cribbage ace — but usually it was Al Templeton’s diner. We sat in a booth with the photos on his Town Wall of Celebrity looking down at us. Al was sick — dying — but his eyes were full of bright intensity.
“The Yellow Card Man’s the personification of the obdurate past,” Al said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Yes, I knew that.
“He thought you’d die from the beating, but you didn’t. He thought you’d die of the infections, but you didn’t. Now he’s walling off those memories — the vital ones — because he knows it’s his last hope of stopping you.”
“How can he? He’s dead.”
Al shook his head. “No, that’s me.”
“Who is he?
“Dunno, buddy. All I know is that he can’t stop you if you refuse to stop.
“Help me, then!” I shouted, and grabbed the hard claw of his hand. “Tell me the guy’s name! Is it Chapman? Manson? Both of those ring a bell, but neither one seems right.
At that point in the dream Al opens his mouth to do just that, but the Yellow Card Man intervenes. If we’re on Main Street, he comes out of the greenfront or the Kennebec Fruit. If it’s the cemetery, he rises from an open grave like a George Romero zombie. If in the diner, the door bursts open. The card he wears in the hatband of his fedora is so black it looks like a rectangular hole in the world. He’s dead and decomposing. His ancient overcoat is splotched with mold. His eye-sockets are writhing balls of worms.
I turn back to Al, only Al has become a skeleton with a cigarette clamped in its teeth, and I wake up, sweating. I reach for the memories but the memories aren’t there.
Deke brought me the newspaper stories about the impending Kennedy visit, hoping they would jog something loose. They didn’t. Once, while I was lying on the couch (I was just coming out of one of my sudden sleeps), I heard the two of them arguing yet again about calling the police. Deke said an anonymous tip would be disregarded and one that came with a name attached would get all of us in trouble.
