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4
Lisbon Falls was as stinky as ever, but at least the power was on; the blinker at the intersection was
flashing as it swung in the northwest wind. The Kennebec Fruit was dark, the front window still
empty of the apples, oranges, and bananas that would be displayed there later on. The sign hanging in
the door of the greenfront read WILL OPEN AT 10 A.M. A few cars moved on Main Street and a few
pedestrians scuttled along with their collars turned up. Across the street, however, the Worumbo mill
was fully operational. I could hear the shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH of the weaving flats even from where
I was standing. Then I heard something else: someone was calling me, although not by either of my
names.
“Jimla! Hey, Jimla!”
I turned toward the mill, thinking: He’s back. The Yellow Card Man is back from the dead, just like
President Kennedy.
Only it wasn’t the Yellow Card Man any more than the taxi driver who’d picked me up at the bus
station was the same one who’d taken me from Lisbon Falls to the Tamarack Motor Court in 1958.
Except the two drivers were almost the same, because the past harmonizes, and the man across the
street was similar to the one who’d asked me for a buck because it was double-money day at the
greenfront. He was a lot younger than the Yellow Card Man, and his black overcoat was newer and
cleaner . . . but it was almost the same coat.
“Jimla! Over here!” He beckoned. The wind flapped the hem of the overcoat; it made the sign to
his left swing on its chain the way the blinker was swinging on its wire. I could still read it, though:
NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED.
Five years, I thought, and that pesky sewer pipe’s still busted.
“Jimla! Don’t make me come over there and get you!”
He probably could; his suicidal predecessor had been able to make it all the way to the greenfront.
But I felt sure that if I went limping down the Old Lewiston Road fast enough, this new version
would be out of luck. He might be able to follow me to the Red & White Supermarket, where Al had
bought his meat, but if I made it as far as Titus Chevron, or the Jolly White Elephant, I could turn
around and thumb my nose at him. He was stuck near the rabbit-hole. If he hadn’t been, I would have
seen him in Dallas. I knew it as surely as I knew that gravity keeps folks from floating into outer
space.
As if to confirm this, he called, “Jimla, please!” The desperation I saw in his face was like the wind:
thin but somehow relentless.
I looked both ways for traffic, saw none, and crossed the street to where he stood. As I approached, I
saw two other differences. Like his predecessor, he was wearing a fedora, but it was clean instead of
filthy. And as with his predecessor, a colored card was poking up from the hatband like an oldfashioned
reporter’s press pass. Only this one wasn’t yellow, or orange, or black.
It was green.
5
“Thank God,” he said. He took one of my hands in both of his and squeezed it. The flesh of his palms
was almost as cold as the air. I pulled back from him, but gently. I sensed no danger about him, only
that thin and insistent desperation. Although that in itself might be dangerous; it might be as keen as
the blade of the knife John Clayton had used on Sadie’s face.