Stephen King: 11/22/63: A Novel

“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 freezer and 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. Plus a penny for the governor.”

I handed over one of Al’s vintage dollars, and Frank 1.0 made change.

I sipped through the foam on top, and was amazed. It was… full. Tasty all the way through. I don’t know how to express it any better than that. This fifty-years-gone world smelled worse than I ever would have expected, but it tasted a whole hell of a lot better.

“This is wonderful,” I said.

“Ayuh? Glad you like it. Not from around here, are you?”

“No.”

“Out-of-stater?”

“Wisconsin,” I said. Not entirely a lie; my family lived in Milwaukee until I was eleven, when my father got a job teaching English at the University of Southern Maine. I’d been knocking around the state ever since.

“Well, you picked the right time to come,” Anicetti said. “Most of the summer people are gone, and as soon as that happens, prices go down. What you’re drinkin, for example. After Labor Day, a ten-cent root beer only costs a dime.”

The bell over the door jangled; the floorboards creaked. It was a companionable creak. The last time I’d ventured into the Kennebec Fruit, hoping for a roll of Tums (I was disappointed), they had groaned.

A boy who might have been seventeen slipped behind the counter. His dark hair was cropped close, not quite a crewcut. His resemblance to the man who had served me was unmistakable, and I realized that this was my Frank Anicetti. The guy who had lopped the head of foam off my root beer was his father. Frank 2.0 didn’t give me so much as a glance; to him I was just another customer.

“Titus has got the truck up on the lift,” he told his dad. “Says it’ll be ready by five.”

“Well, that’s good,” Anicetti Senior said, and lit a cigarette. For the first time I noticed the marble top of the soda fountain was lined with small ceramic ashtrays. Written on the sides was WINSTON TASTES GOOD LIKE A CIGARETTE SHOULD! He looked back at me and said, “You want a scoop of vanilla in your beer? On the house. We like to treat tourists right, especially when they turn up late.”

“Thanks, but this is fine,” I said, and it was. Any more sweetness and I thought my head would explode. And it was strong -like drinking carbonated espresso.

The kid gave me a grin that was as sweet as the stuff in the frosted mug-there was none of the amused disdain I’d felt emanating from the Elvis wannabe outside. “We read a story in school,” he said, “where the locals eat the tourists if they show up after the season’s over.”

“Frankie, that’s a hell of a thing to tell a visitor,” Mr. Anicetti said. But he was smiling when he said it.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve taught that story myself. Shirley Jackson, right? ‘The Summer People.’”

“That’s the one,” Frank agreed. “I didn’t really get it, but I liked it.”

I took another pull on my root beer, and when I set it down (it made a satisfyingly thick chunk on the marble counter), I wasn’t exactly surprised to see it was almost gone. I could get addicted to these, I thought. It beats the living shit out of Moxie.

The elder Anicetti exhaled a plume of smoke toward the ceiling, where an overhead paddle fan pulled it into lazy blue rafters. “Do you teach out in Wisconsin, Mr.-?”

“Epping,” I said. I was too caught by surprise to even think of giving a fake name. “I do, actually. But this is my sabbatical year.”

“That means he’s taking a year off,” Frank said.

“I know what it means,” Anicetti said. He was trying to sound irritated and doing a bad job of it. I decided I liked these two as much as I liked the root beer. I even liked the aspiring teenage hood outside, if only because he didn’t know he was already a cliche. There was a sense of safety here, a sense of-I don’t know-preordination. It was surely false, this world was as dangerous as any other, but I possessed one piece of knowledge I would before this afternoon have believed was reserved only for God: I knew that the smiling boy who had enjoyed the Shirley Jackson story (even though he didn’t “get it”) was going to live through that day and over fifty years of days to come. He wasn’t going to be killed in a car crash, have a heart attack, or contract lung cancer from breathing his father’s secondhand smoke. Frank Anicetti was good to go.

I glanced at the clock on the wall (START YOUR DAY WITH A SMILE, the face said, DRINK CHEER-UP COFFEE). It read 12:22. That was nothing to me, but I pretended to be startled. I drank off the rest of my beeyah and stood up. “Got to get moving if I’m going to meet my friends in Castle Rock on time.”

“Well, take it easy on Route 117,” Anicetti said. “That road’s a bugger.” It came out buggah. I hadn’t heard such a thick Maine accent in years. Then I realized that was literally true, and I almost laughed out loud.

“I will,” I said. “Thanks. And son? About that Shirley Jackson story.”

“Yes, sir?” Sir, yet. And nothing sarcastic about it. I was deciding that 1958 had been a pretty good year. Aside from the stench of the mill and the cigarette smoke, that was.

“There’s nothing to get.”

“No? That’s not what Mr. Marchant says.”

“With all due respect to Mr. Marchant, you tell him Jake Epping says that sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.”

He laughed. “I will! Period three tomorrow morning!”

“Good.” I nodded to the father, wishing I could tell him that, thanks to Moxie (which he didn’t carry… yet), his business was going to be standing on the corner of Main Street and the Old Lewiston Road long after he was gone. “Thanks for the root beer.”

“Come back anytime, son. I’m thinking about lowering the price on the large.”

“To a dime?”

He grinned. Like his son’s, it was easy and open. “Now you’re cooking with gas.”

The bell jingled. Three ladies came in. No slacks; they wore dresses with hemlines that dropped halfway down their shins. And hats! Two with little fluffs of white veil. They began rummaging through the open crates of fruit, looking for perfection. I started away from the soda fountain, then had a thought and turned back.

“Can you tell me what a greenfront is?”

The father and the son exchanged an amused glance that made me think of an old joke. Tourist from Chicago driving a fancy sportscar pulls up to a farmhouse way out in the country. Old farmer’s sitting on the porch, smoking a corncob pipe. Tourist leans out of his Jaguar and asks, “Say, oldtimer, can you tell me how to get to East Machias?” Old farmer puffs thoughtfully on his pipe a time or two, then says, “Don’tcha move a goddam inch.”

“You really are an out-of-stater, aren’t you?” Frank asked. His accent wasn’t as thick as his father’s. Probably watches more TV, I thought. There’s nothing like TV when it comes to eroding a regional accent.

“I am,” I said.

“That’s funny, because I could swear I hear a little Yankee twang.”

“It’s a Yooper thing,” I said. “You know, the Upper Peninsula?” Except-dang!-the UP was Michigan.

But neither of them seemed to realize it. In fact young Frank turned away and started doing dishes. By hand, I noticed.