Read 11/22/63: A Novel for Free Online

think it would blow away, but I found a little chunk of concrete and used it as a paperweight, just to be sure. It landed on the step, but it also landed on the scrap of memo. Because there
was
no step. A snatch of some old pop song drifted through my head:
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
    Look around a little, Al had said, and I decided that was what I’d do. I figured if I hadn’t lost my mind already, I was probably going to be okay for awhile longer. Unless I saw a parade of pink elephants or a UFO hovering over John Crafts Auto, that was. I tried to tell myself this wasn’t happening,
couldn’t
be happening, but it wouldn’t wash. Philosophers and psychologists may argue over what’s real and what isn’t, but most of us living ordinary lives know and accept the texture of the world around us. This was happening. All else aside, it was too goddam stinky to be a hallucination.
    I walked to the chain, which hung at thigh level, and ducked beneath it. Stenciled in black paint on the other side was NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED . I looked back again, saw no indication that repairs were in the immediate offing, walked around the corner of the drying shed, and almost stumbled over the man sunning himself there. Not that he could expect to get much of a tan. He was wearing an old black overcoat that puddled around him like an amorphous shadow. There were dried crackles of snot on both sleeves. The body inside the coat was scrawny to the point of emaciation. His iron-gray hair hung in snaggles around his beard-scruffy cheeks. He was a wino if ever a wino there was.
    Cocked back on his head was a filthy fedora that looked straight out of a 1950s film noir, the kind where all the women have big bazonkas and all the men talk fast around the cigarettes stuck in the corners of their mouths. And yep, poking up from the fedora’s hatband, like an old-fashioned reporter’s press pass, was a yellow card. Once it had probably been a bright yellow, but much handling by grimy fingers had turned it bleary.
    When my shadow fell across his lap, the Yellow Card Man turned and surveyed me with bleary eyes.
    “Who the fuck’re you?” he asked, only it came out
Hoo-a fuck-a you?
    Al hadn’t given me detailed instructions on how to answer questions, so I said what seemed safest. “None of your fucking business.”
    “Well fuck you, too.”
    “Fine,” I said. “We are in accord.”
    “Huh?”
    “Have a nice day.” I started toward the gate, which stood open on a steel track. Beyond it, to the left, was a parking lot that had never been there before. It was full of cars, most of them battered and all of them old enough to belong in a car museum. There were Buicks with portholes and Fords with torpedo noses.
Those belong to actual millworkers,
I thought.
Actual millworkers who are inside now, working for hourly wages.
    “I got a yellow card from the greenfront,” the wino said. He sounded both truculent and troubled. “So gimme a buck because today’s double-money day.”
    I held the fifty-cent piece out to him. Feeling like an actor who only has one line in the play, I said: “I can’t spare a buck, but here’s half a rock.”
    Then you give it to him,
Al had said, but I didn’t need to. The Yellow Card Man snatched it from me and held it close to his face. For a moment I thought he was actually going to bite into it, but he just closed his long-fingered hand around it in a fist, making it disappear. He peered at me again, his face almost comic with distrust.
    “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
    “I’ll be damned if I know,” I said, and turned back to the gate. I expected him to hurl more questions after me, but there was only silence. I went out through the gate.
4
    The newest car in the lot was a Plymouth Fury from—I think—the mid-or late fifties. The plate on it looked like an impossibly antique version of the one on the back of my