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

over the door (FRESH UP WITH 7-UP on top, WELCOME TO THE KENNEBEC FRUIT CO. below) was bright enough to throw arrows of sun at my eyes. The paint was fresh, the roof unbowed by the weather. People were going in and coming out. And in the show window, instead of a cat . . .
    Oranges, by God. The Kennebec Fruit Company once sold actual fruit. Who knew?
    I started across the street, then pulled back as an inter-city bus snored toward me. The route sign above the divided windshield read LEWISTON EXPRESS. When the bus braked to a stop at the railroad crossing, I saw that most of the passengers were smoking. The atmosphere in there must have been roughly akin to the atmosphere of Saturn.
    Once the bus had gone on its way (leaving behind a smell of half-cooked diesel to mix with the rotten-egg stench belching from the Worumbo’s stacks), I crossed the street, wondering briefly what would happen if I were hit by a car. Would I blink out of existence? Wake up lying on the floor of Al’s pantry? Probably neither. Probably I would just die here, in a past for which a lot of people probably felt nostalgic. Possibly because they had forgotten how bad the past smelled, or because they had never considered that aspect of the Nifty Fifties in the first place.
    A kid was standing outside the Fruit Company with one black-booted foot cocked back against the wood siding. The collar of his shirt was turned up at the nape of his neck, and his hair was combed in a style I recognized (from old movies, mostly) as Early Elvis. Unlike the boys I was used to seeing in my classes, he sported no goatee, not even a flavor patch below the chin. I realized that in the world I was now visiting (I
hoped
I was only visiting), he’d be kicked out of LHS for showing up with even a single strand of facial hair. Instantly.
    I nodded to him. James Dean nodded back and said, “Hi-ho, Daddy-O.”
    I went inside. A bell jingled above the door. Instead of dust and gently decaying wood, I smelled oranges, apples, coffee, and fragrant tobacco. To my right was a rack of comic books with their covers torn off—
Archie, Batman, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Tales from the Crypt.
The hand-printed sign above this trove, which would have sent any eBay aficionado into paroxysms, read COMIX 5¢ EA THREE FOR 10¢ NINE FOR A QUARTER
PLEASE DON’T HANDLE UNLESS YOU INTEND TO BUY.
    On the left was a rack of newspapers. No
New York Times,
but there were copies of the
Portland Press Herald
and one leftover
Boston Globe.
The
Globe
’s headline trumpeted, DULLES HINTS CONCESSIONS IF RED CHINA RENOUNCES USE OF FORCE IN FORMOSA . The dates on both were Tuesday, September 9, 1958.
5
    I took the
Globe,
which sold for eight cents, and walked toward a marble-topped soda fountain that did not exist in my time. Standing behind it was Frank Anicetti. It was him all right, right down to the distinguished wings of gray above his ears. Only this version—call him Frank 1.0—was thin instead of plump, and wearing rimless bifocals. He was also taller. Feeling like a stranger in my own body, I slid onto one of the stools.
    He nodded at the paper. “That going to do you, or can I get you something from the fountain?”
    “Anything cold that’s not Moxie,” I heard myself say.
    Frank 1.0 smiled at that. “Don’t carry it, son. How about a root beer instead?”
    “Sounds good.” And it did. My throat was dry and my head was hot. I felt like I was running a fever.
    “Five or ten?”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Five-or ten-cent beer?” He said it the Maine way:
beeyah.
    “Oh. Ten, I guess.”
    “Well, I guess you guess right.” He opened an ice cream freezerand removed a frosty mug roughly the size of a lemonade pitcher. He filled it from a tap and I could smell the root beer, rich and strong. He scraped the foam off the top with the handle of a wooden spoon, then filled it all the way to the top and set it down on the counter. “There you go. That and the paper’s eighteen cents.