Free Mile 81 by Stephen King

to move in across the street from where I now lived, along with his Russian wife and their baby girl? By telling her that the Dallas Texans—not yet the Cowboys, not yet America’s Team—were going to beat the Houston Oilers 20-17 this fall, in double overtime? Ridiculous. But what else did I know about the immediate future? Not much, because I’d had no time to study up. I knew a fair amount about Oswald, but that was all.
    She’d think I was crazy. I could sing her lyrics from another dozen pop songs that hadn’t been recorded yet, and she’d still think I was crazy. She’d accuse me of making them up myself— wasn’t I a writer, after all? And suppose she did believe it? Did I want to drag her into the shark’s mouth with me? Wasn’t it bad enough that she’d be coming back to Jodie in August, and that if John Clayton was an echo of Frank Dunning, he might come looking for her?
    “All right, get out then!” a woman screamed from the street, and a car accelerated away in the direction of Winscott Road. A wedge of light probed briefly through a crack in my drawn curtains and flashed across the ceiling.
    “COCKSUCKER!” she yelled after it, to which a male voice, a little more distant, yelled back: “You can suck mine, lady, maybe it’ll calm you down.”
    That was life on Mercedes Street in the summer of ’62.
    Leave her out of it. That was the voice of reason. It’s just too dangerous. Maybe at some point she can be a part of your life again—a life in Jodie, even—but not now.
    Only there was never going to be a life for me in Jodie. Given what Ellen now knew about my past, teaching at the high school was a fool’s dream. And what else was I going to do? Pour concrete?
    One morning I put on the coffeepot and went for the paper on the stoop. When I opened the front door, I saw that both of the Sunliner’s rear tires were flat. Some bored out-too-late kid had slashed them with a knife. That was also life on Mercedes Street in the summer of ’62.
    On Thursday, the fourteenth of June, I dressed in jeans, a blue workshirt, and an old leather vest I’d picked up at a secondhand store on Camp Bowie Road. Then I spent the morning pacing through my house. I had no television, but I listened to the radio. According to the news, President Kennedy was planning a state trip to Mexico later in the month. The weather report called for fair skies and warm temperatures. The DJ yammered awhile, then played “Palisades Park.” The screams and roller-coaster sound effects on the record clawed at my head.
    At last I could stand it no longer. I was going to be early, but I didn’t care. I got into the Sunliner—which now sported two retread blackwalls to go with the whitewalls on the front—and drove the forty-odd miles to Love Field in northwest Dallas. There was no short-term or long-term parking, just parking. it cost seventy-five cents a day. I clapped my old summer straw on my head and trudged approximately half a mile to the terminal building. A couple of Dallas cops stood at the curb drinking coffee, but there were no security guards inside and no metal detectors to walk through. Passengers simply showed their tickets to a guy standing by the door, then walked across the hot tarmac to planes belonging to one of five carriers: American, Delta, TWA, Frontier, and Texas Airways.
    I checked the chalkboard mounted on the wall behind the Delta counter. it said that Flight 194 was on time. When I asked the clerk to make sure, she smiled and told me it had just left Atlanta. “But you’re awfully early.”
    “I can’t help it,” I said. “I’ll probably be early to my own funeral.”
    She laughed and wished me a nice day. I bought a Time and walked across to the restaurant, where I ordered the Cloud 9 Chef’s Salad. it was huge and I was too nervous to be hungry—it’s not every day that a man gets to see the person who’s going to change world history—but it gave me something to pick at while I waited