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“They’re saying seven thousand dead, but when you hear a number like that, you know it’ll go
higher. Most of the damn bridges fell down, the freeways are in pieces, and there’s fires everywhere.
Seems like the part of town where the Negroes live has pretty much burnt flat. Warts! Ain’t that a
hell of a name for a part of a town? I mean, even one where black folks live? Warts! Huh!”
I didn’t reply. I was thinking of Rags, the puppy we’d had when I was nine, and still living in
Wisconsin. I was allowed to play with him in the backyard on school mornings until the bus came. I
was teaching him to sit, fetch, roll over, stuff like that, and he was learning—smart puppy! I loved
him a lot.
When the bus came, I was supposed to close the backyard gate before I ran to get on board. Rags
always lay down on the kitchen stoop. My mother would call him in and feed him breakfast after she
got back from taking my dad to the local train station. I always remembered to close the gate—or at
least, I don’t remember ever forgetting to do it—but one day when I came home from school, my
mother told me Rags was dead. He’d been in the street and a delivery truck had run him down. She
never reproached me with her mouth, not once, but she reproached me with her eyes. Because she had
loved Rags, too.
“I closed him in like always,” I said through my tears, and—as I say—I believe that I did. Maybe
because I always had. That evening my dad and I buried him in the backyard. Probably not legal, Dad
said, but I won’t tell if you won’t.
I lay awake for a long, long time that night, haunted by what I couldn’t remember and terrified of
what I might have done. Not to mention guilty. That guilt lingered a long time, a year or more. If I
could have remembered for sure, one way or the other, I’m positive it would have left me more
quickly. But I couldn’t. Had I shut the gate, or hadn’t I? Again and again I cast my mind to my
puppy’s final morning and could remember nothing clearly except heaving his rawhide strip and
yelling, “Fetch, Rags, fetch!”
It was like that on my taxi ride to The Falls. First I tried to tell myself that there always had been
an earthquake in late November of 1963. It was just one of those factoids—like the attempted
assassination of Edwin Walker—that I had missed. As I’d told Al Templeton I majored in English,
not history.
It wouldn’t wash. If an earthquake like that had happened in the America I’d lived in before going
down the rabbit-hole, I would have known. There were far bigger disasters—the Indian Ocean
tsunami of 2004 killed over two hundred thousand—but seven thousand was a big number for
America, more than twice as many fatalities as had occurred on 9/11.
Next I asked myself how what I’d done in Dallas could possibly have caused what this sturdy
woman claimed had happened in LA. The only answer I could come up with was the butterfly effect,
but how could it kick into gear so soon? No way. Absolutely not. There was no conceivable chain of
cause and effect between the two events.
And still a deep part of my mind whispered, You did this. You caused Rags’s death by either leaving the
backyard gate open or not closing it firmly enough to latch . . . and you caused this. You and Al spouted a lot of
noble talk about saving thousands of lives in Vietnam, but this is your first real contribution to the New
History: seven thousand dead in LA.
It simply couldn’t be. Even if it was. . . .
There’s no downside, Al had said. If things turn to shit, you just take it all back. Easy as erasing a dirty
word off a chalkb—
“Mister?” my driver said. “We’re here.” She turned to look at me curiously. “We’ve been here for
almost three minutes. Little early for shopping, though. Are you sure this is where you want to be?”
I only knew this was where I had to be. I paid what was on the meter, added a generous tip (it was
the FBI’s money, after all), wished her a nice day, and got out.