Don’t mess with Texas, I thought . . . but maybe I was going to. And given Al’s difficulties with changing the past—the blown tires, the blown engine, the collapsed bridge—I had an idea that if I went ahead, Texas was going to mess with me.

2

After all that, I didn’t think I’d be able to get to sleep before two or three in the morning, and there was a fair likelihood that I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep at all. But sometimes the body asserts its own imperatives. By the time I got home and fixed myself a weak drink (being able to have liquor in the house again was one of several small pluses in my return to the single state), I was heavy-eyed; by the time I had finished the scotch and read the first nine or ten pages of Al’s Oswald Book, I could barely keep them open.

I rinsed my glass in the sink, went into the bedroom (leaving a trail of clothes behind me as I walked, a thing Christy would have given me hell about), and fell onto the double bed where I now slept single. I thought about reaching over to turn off the bedside lamp, but my arm felt heavy, heavy. Correcting honors essays in the strangely quiet teachers’ room now seemed like something that had happened a very long time ago. Nor was that strange; everyone knows that, for such an unforgiving thing, time is uniquely malleable.

I crippled that girl. Put her back in a wheelchair.

When you went down those steps from the pantry this afternoon, you didn’t even know who Carolyn Poulin was, so don’t be an ass. Besides, maybe somewhere she’s still walking. Maybe going through that hole creates alternate realities, or time-streams, or some damn thing.

Carolyn Poulin, sitting in her wheelchair and getting her diploma. Back in the year when

“Hang On Sloopy” by the McCoys was top of the pops.

Carolyn Poulin, walking through her garden of daylilies in 1979, when “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People was top of the pops; occasionally dropping to one knee to pull some weeds, then springing up again and walking on.

Carolyn Poulin in the woods with her dad, soon to be crippled.

Carolyn Poulin in the woods with her dad, soon to walk into an ordinary smalltown adolescence. Where had she been on that time-stream, I wondered, when the radio and TV bulletins announced that the thirty-fifth President of the United States had been shot in Dallas?

John Kennedy can live. You can save him, Jake.

And would that really make things better? There were no guarantees.

I felt like a man trying to fight his way out of a nylon stocking.

I closed my eyes and saw pages flying off a calendar—the kind of corny transition they used in old movies. I saw them flying out my bedroom window like birds.

One more thought came before I dropped off: the dopey sophomore with the even dopier straggle of goatee on his chin, grinning and muttering, Hoptoad Harry, hoppin down the av-a- new.

And Harry stopping me when I went to call the kid on it. Nah, don’t bother, he’d said. I’m used to it.

Then I was gone, down for the count.

3

I woke up to early light and twittering birdsong, pawing at my face, sure I had cried just before waking. I’d had a dream, and although I couldn’t remember what it was, it must have been a very sad one, because I have never been what you’d call a crying man.

Dry cheeks. No tears.

I turned my head on the pillow to look at the clock on the nightstand and saw it lacked just two minutes of 6:00 A.M. Given the quality of the light, it was going to be a beautiful June morning, and school was out. The first day of summer vacation is usually as happy for teachers as it is for students, but I felt sad. Sad. And not just because I had a tough decision to make.

Halfway to the shower, three words popped into my mind: Kowabunga, Buffalo Bob!

I stopped, naked and looking at my own wide-eyed reflection in the mirror over the dresser.

Now I remembered the dream, and it was no wonder I’d awoken feeling sad. I’d dreamed I was in the teachers’ room, reading Adult English themes while down the hall in the gymnasium, another high school basketball game wound down toward another final buzzer. My wife was just out of rehab. I was hoping that she’d be home when I got there and I wouldn’t have to spend an hour on the phone before locating her and fishing her out of some local waterhole.

In the dream, I had shifted Harry Dunning’s essay to the top of the pile and begun to read: It wasnt a day but a night. The night that change my life was the night my father murdirt my mother and two brothers. . . .

That had gotten my full attention, and in a hurry. Well, it would get anybody’s, wouldn’t it?

But my eyes had only begun to sting when I got to the part about what he’d been wearing. The outfit made perfect sense, too. When kids went out on that special fall night, carrying empty bags they hoped to bring back filled with sweet swag, their costumes always reflected the current craze. Five years ago, it seemed that every second boy who showed up at my door was wearing Harry Potter eyeglasses and a lightning-bolt-scar decal on his forehead. On my own maiden voyage as a candy-beggar, many moons ago, I’d gone clanking down the sidewalk (with my mother trailing ten feet behind me, at my urgent request) dressed as a snowtrooper from The Empire Strikes Back. So was it surprising that Harry Dunning had been wearing buckskin?

“Kowabunga, Buffalo Bob,” I told my reflection, and suddenly ran for my study. I don’t keep all student work, no teacher does—you’d drown in it!—but I made a habit of photocopying the best essays. They make great teaching tools. I never would have used Harry’s in class, it was far too personal for that, but I thought I remembered making a copy of it just the same, because it had provoked such a strong emotional reaction in me. I pulled open the bottom drawer and began thumbing through the rat’s nest of folders and loose papers. After fifteen sweaty minutes, I found it.

I sat down in my desk chair and began to read.

4

It wasnt a day but a night. The night that change my life was the night my father murdirt my mother and two brothers and hurt me bad. He hurt my sister too, so bad she went into a comah. In three years she died without waking up. Her name was Ellen and I loved her very much. She love to pick flowers and put them in vayses. What happen was like a horra movie. I never go see horra movies because on Halloween night in 1958 I lived thru one.

My brother Troy was to old for trick and treat (15). He was watching TV with my mother and said he would help us eat our candy when we came back and Ellen, she said no you won’t, dress up and get your own, and everybody laughed because we all loved Ellen, she was only 7 but she was a real Lucile Ball, she could make anybody laugh, even my father (if he was sober that is, when he was drunk he was always mad). She was going as Princess Summerfall Winterspring (I look it up and that’s how you spell it) and I was going as Buffalo Bob, both from THE HOWDY