Fast Backward

by David Patneaude

  It’s only Mr. Unser. One of his mares is foaling and having problems. Dad rushes out the door, leaving the house full of expectation and the useless chatter of the radio.

  An hour later the phone rings again, and this time it’s Pete.

  “What happened?” I say.

  “So far, so good. Lieutenant Bush was skeptical, but concerned enough that he’s already taken the letter to Doctor Bainbridge. How much Bainbridge knows about the bombs and ships is anyone’s guess, but he’ll know who to talk to.”

  “You think the lieutenant can convince Bainbridge?”

  “I think Lieutenant Bush’s uneasiness over the threat will infect anyone he talks to, up to a point. It’s a convincing letter, and if the military information in it—the bombs and how they’re being transported—is accurate, that should be enough to keep it moving along.”

  “Only two days.”

  “Pray, Bobby.”

  When Dad returns, he hauls a bike from the DeSoto’s back seat. It’s an old Schwinn—faded blue paint and flat tires and a layer of dust—that’s been taking up a space in the Unsers’ barn, which now belongs to the newborn colt. With Cocoa in mind, Dad asked about the bike, and Mr. Unser told him to take it, that the time of kids and grandkids is past.

  Time. I’ve never before thought so much about time.

  Cocoa and I spend the next few hours in the shade next to the barn, cleaning the bike, patching a tube, pumping up tires. When we’re done, it looks good—nothing bent, no dents or rust. It’s a boy’s bike, but I wonder if Cocoa even knows the difference.

  “Have you ever ridden one?” I ask as we admire our handiwork.

  “Where I come from, there is no fuel. Bicycles give us a way to get around.”

  I attempt to imagine her world. Or her imaginary world. But my disbelief is mostly gone. I no longer have to stretch to picture what she’s said about where she came from. I can visualize war. Ruined earth. Ruined air. Lawlessness. Loss. Disease. Death.

  It’s harder to imagine the stuff she’s left unsaid. What was it like for her to lose her parents? To have no one? To be at the mercy of anyone who wanted to harm her? To go hungry? To struggle to breathe?

  In how many ways did she suffer?

  I find myself praying that the people who matter accept our letter’s wild-ass claims. “Give it a try,” I say, balancing the bike for her.

  She swings a leg over, but she’s pretty much a regular-height girl—five-four, maybe—and the seat is too high. Once we lower it, she climbs back on and takes off across the yard and down the long driveway. She picks up speed, her skinny legs churning and blurring, her fine blondish hair flying. When she gets to the mailbox she turns around and starts back, and as she gets near, she stops concentrating on the ground and looks up—at me—and smiles.

  Dad steps out on the front porch. “Thank you, Chuck!” she yells above the rattles.

  “You look good on it, Cocoa!” he yells back. He glances in my direction and winks.

  The rest of the day passes, Mom leaves, evening comes, supper, nightfall. No word from Uncle Pete. No news is not good news, I think, but it’s not bad news either. If someone up the line ridiculed the information, and Pete heard about it, he would’ve called.

  Cocoa goes to bed. I decide to also. But Dad stops me on my way to my room.

  “You know what we’ve done will most likely turn out to be us simply humoring Cocoa, right, Bobby?”

  He’s surprised me. “You still think so?”

  “Because of how convincing she’s been, and how high the stakes are, it’s worth going through the exercise, but think about it. While we’re pounding the snot out of the Nazis, they develop a super bomb, they manage to sink the two ships that are carrying our super bombs, and a skinny shell-shocked girl is the only one who knows about it because she’s come here from a future world via time travel?”

  His words hit me hard. We’re humoring her. Does everybody believe that? Anger rises to my throat. But he either believes or he doesn’t. Cocoa will either be right or wrong.

  “I just don’t want you to get your hopes sky high,” he adds.

  “Time slippage,” I say, and head for bed.

  Dad stays up, nursing his skepticism and waiting for Mom. From my room, I hear him clacking away at the typewriter, working on something that faces worse odds than our letter.

  It feels like I’ve just gone to sleep when I have this dream about walking through our yard in the dark and hearing a girl screaming, and the screams get more terrified, and terrifying, and familiar, and they’re coming from a rusted-out car sitting on flattened tires at the side of a potholed road.

  When I wake up, the screams don’t stop. They come in bursts, like distant sirens. But they’re not distant, and I leap from bed and race down the hall toward Cocoa’s room in my Navy-issue boxers. When I get there, Mom is already at Cocoa’s bedside, holding her. An instant later Dad arrives.

  He and I stand motionless in the light from the hallway.

  Tits on a bull.

  Cocoa’s screams have become whimpers. Mom gives good hugs. But I should be the one doing the hugging.

  Cocoa’s first words are foreign: “Verzeihung. Ein alptraum.” I imagine a ruined library, rubble, rats, a low, sickly sky. “Sorry,” she says, opening her eyes. “It seemed real. I felt as if I were in the water, or hovering above it.” She shakes her head, gulps air. Her nightgown is sleeveless, and a deep shade of pink, showing off her bony white shoulders.

  “Where?” I ask.

  “An open sea. Waves slick with oil and blood. Sailors in the water and on ruined rafts. Sharks everywhere, circling, churning, slashing. Jaws like vises. Teeth like razors. Picking and choosing, picking and choosing. Men trying to ward them off or helping their comrades. Or giving up. A nightmare. But not.”

  “Is this something you read about, Cocoa?” Mom says.

  “A video?” I say.

  Cocoa hesitates. “I suppose.”

  “Is it one of the two ships?” Dad asks, not sounding skeptical. “The survivors?”

  “Can you remember the names now?” I say. “This nightmare ship, anyway?”

  She scratches at her skull, as if she’s trying to dig something out of her wispy hair. Her forehead is glossy. Mom gives her breathing room. “The name is in my brain, but hiding. It fucking refuses to come out.”

  “It doesn’t matter, honey,” Mom says, not even blinking at Cocoa’s use of one of our household’s forbidden words. Apparently, the rules of the present don’t apply to this girl from the future.

  Dad doesn’t react much either. But even in the scarce light I can see the light pink of his face deepen to the shade of Cocoa’s nightgown.

  “Where do sharks live?” Cocoa whispers. A shudder moves through her when she names the beasts.

  “Almost everywhere,” Dad says.

  “Wherever a ship sinks,” I say, and I picture the knife-like fins and the shadowy bodies, tubular and gristly and fast like torpedoes. I picture the bloody water and the teeth and jaws and the men waiting to die and I tell myself that Cocoa’s vision wasn’t an experience or a prediction, it was just a garden-variety nightmare. And then I promise myself that when the time comes for me to go to war, I’ll enlist in anything but the Navy.

  FOURTEEN

  Thursday, July 19

  I ’m barely asleep when my alarm wakes me, not from a dream but from the haunt of Cocoa’s screams, her words, her expressions. My bed is cozy and I have a long, chilly bike ride ahead of me, but I have no trouble getting up and heading for the bathroom. Without Lolly in my way, I have a clear path. Almost everything I have and want is within these walls, but part of me is glad I’ll be leaving the house and its chilling echoes of the night.

  At the base camp, there are more signs of people moving out. I find Uncle Pete, but he’s on his way to bed and has no news. Doctor Bainbridge is busier than usual and hasn’t gotten back to Lieutenant Bush.

  I’m tempted to tell Pete about Coco
a’s nightmare. Sunken ships. Sharks. Blood in the water. What could be more important than preventing the nightmare from coming true?

  But he’s done his part. And returning to his lieutenant with a tale of a strange girl’s scary dreams won’t add weight to the contents of a letter that has nothing to do with her.

  Back home I find Cocoa in the kitchen, standing at the wall calendar holding a cup of coffee. She nods distractedly. My best friend, Lolly, his big head resting comfortably on her feet, grants me two sweeps of his tail.

  “Tomorrow,” she says as I drop the Journal on the table. She stares at the calendar, as if she’s willing today’s date to slip backward the way she claims she did.

  “Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe some big shot will do something. Maybe you’re off on the date, or maybe you’re all the way off. On everything.”

  “Thanks for having so much faith in me, Robert.”

  “Those would be good things.”

  “Me being all the way off is not a good thing.”

  “It’s the one we should hope for. Who could blame you?”

  “It is not true. And I am afraid you are going to find that out.”

  “You’ve been through some shit.”

  “If we don’t stop this, your world will be going through some shit.”

  My stomach growls. I pour myself some coffee, open the refrigerator. On a bottom shelf, Mom has left a mixing bowl full of peanut butter cookie dough. I take a three-fingered scoop. It’s cool and smooth and nutty and sweet, perfect for a pre-breakfast snack.

  I excavate another blob and carry it to Cocoa, resisting the temptation to toss it. There’s a good chance her catching resembles her throwing.

  “Thank you,” she says, and takes a nibble. Her eyes light. She pops the rest in her mouth and chews slowly.

  “You like?” I say.

  She swallows. “Kick-ass,” she says, which I take as a yes. Her eyes go back to the calendar, and I sit with the newspaper. I’ll look for something more likely than days slipping away in reverse order: American ships sunk; German bombs wiping out an army, or a country, or the world.

  Franklin the rooster greets the new day belatedly. Cocoa and I tend to the animals. We ride our bikes to the road and back in speedy loops. If the phone rings, I want to be there.

  After breakfast, when it finally sounds off, it’s not Pete. It’s the doctor, telling Mom that he’d like to see Cocoa again, today preferably, to go over the results of her tests. Which fits in with Dad’s plans. He’s finished an article for the Chieftain that he wants to drop off at the newspaper office, and he has a noon meeting with his conscientious objector group. On Saturday, groups from all over New Mexico are marching for peace in Santa Fe.

  It’s a coordinated effort; in nearly every state, marchers will descend on capitals, carrying their signs and making their voices heard. Trying, anyway. Since Pearl Harbor galvanized nearly everyone’s thinking on the war effort, the pacifists’ demonstrations seem to drive more people away than they’ve drawn in. Families and friends and loved ones of fighting men want them to come home, but not if it means letting Germany and Japan off the mat.

  The frequency of the national marches has steadily increased—up to once a month now—which only annoys people more. Many cities attract countermarches and letters to the editors of their newspapers. Instead of peacemakers, the letters refer to them as sympathizers and collaborators and traitors. The government—the FBI, mostly—has taken notice, bringing in COs and pacifists for questioning. Dad had his turn. A day after two agents came to the Journal offices and hauled him off for an afternoon of interrogation, he lost his job.

  Mom makes an appointment for ten thirty. While the three of them get cleaned up and dressed, I sit in the living room and listen to the radio. Somebody has to stay focused.

  After a while Cocoa emerges, showing off a summery, peach dress and brown-and-white saddle shoes and bobby socks and a grin. I wouldn’t think she had enough hair to pull back, but it’s tied behind her head with a red ribbon. She wears lipstick to match and something on her eyelashes that makes them darker and longer. Mom’s handiwork.

  Under the clothes Cocoa’s still skinny, of course, and under her skin there’s other stuff going on, but this is the best I’ve seen her look. Pulse-quickening. I have second thoughts about choosing the radio over good grooming.

  “What do you think, Robert?”

  I get up and switch off the radio. She’s put me on the spot. “Nice,” I manage.

  “Is that the same as beautiful?”

  Mom and Dad walk in, rescuing me. They’re also dressed in their going-to-town clothes, leaving me as the only country bumpkin. I might as well put on a battered straw hat and stick a weed in my mouth and smear cow shit on my shoes.

  I casually brush breakfast crumbs from my T-shirt and shorts, get in the back seat with Cocoa, and listen to Dad go on and on about today’s meeting and Saturday’s demonstration and how it doesn’t matter if public opinion and the government are against them. That big movements usually begin with small, unpopular first steps.

  I wish he’d be like other dads and drop out, especially now that Cocoa’s told us about the fate of the world if Hitler gets his way. Pay attention to which way the wind’s blowing, shut up about the war, go to work, come home, don’t be a target, don’t make your family a target. You might have a job. Your son might have a friend.

  But that’s not him. And if it were, would he still be the dad I care so much about?

  Mom doesn’t share his enthusiasm, but she hasn’t discouraged him. In theory, she believes in pacifism. But she also believes in the value of jobs and earnings and neighbors who don’t hate you. She believes her brother and her husband should respect and like if not love each other. She believes Hitler is the supreme asshole of all assholes and Emperor Hirohito and his crew will take over the entire Pacific if we allow that to happen.

  Cocoa gazes through her dusty car window at puffy white clouds moving across the blue; I gaze out my open one at unspoiled desert stretching to the mountains in the distance. I picture German tanks rumbling over yucca and mesquite and Nazi soldiers goose-stepping behind them and the sky gray with ash and death. Instead of Dad’s drone, I wish for a radio voice assuring everyone that the trend of positive stories from the war is continuing.

  But there’s only Dad and the grumble of the engine and the wind rushing through my open window and the hiss of tires on baked pavement.

  There’s no radio in the old DeSoto. And no good news.

  It’s a Thursday morning in July, and Socorro is quiet. On the sidewalks are a few kids, a few women, a couple of older men. The younger men are gone to war.

  Doctor Kersey is ready for Cocoa. Marla the blond nurse shows the patient and Mom into his consultation room, or whatever he’s calling it today. Dad and I sit. His undersized chair creaks with his bulk.

  “I wonder why the doc wanted to see her again,” he says.

  “To go over the test results, supposedly. I don’t know why he couldn’t just call.”

  “Maybe he wanted to examine her again.”

  “Maybe she’ll be better,” I say.

  “Definitely looks better. Don’t you think so, Bobby?” He gives me a sideways glance and a grin.

  “Mom did a good job of helping her pick out clothes and stuff,” I say, dodging the gist of his question. “But we need to feed her more. She weighs less than one of your arms.”

  “Mom’s taking you to lunch while I’m at my meeting. Finish it off with some ice cream. The Chieftain is actually paying me for the article I’m dropping off.”

  “It’s not about the peace movement, is it?”

  “Not much demand for peace movement articles,” he says. “The war movement gets all the ink. It’s about the scenic wonders of New Mexico.”

  “Not controversial.”

  “Even rabble rousers need to earn a living.”

  I don’t have a response, but I wonder if it’s something he’s hear
d Mom say.

  “We have a baseline now,” Dr. Kersey says as he and Cocoa emerge with Mom on their heels. “So now, Dottie, I’d like to see Cocoa once a week to evaluate her progress.” Marla checks the calendar and sets up an appointment for a week from today—Thursday the twenty-sixth.

  Mom has described Marla as voluptuous. When she does, Dad resists commenting. In nearly twenty years of marriage, he’s learned. But now, as the nurse turns her rear end to us and bends to write the appointment in the appointment book and Mom’s attention is elsewhere, he raises an eyebrow and gives me a look. And in spite of all that’s going on, I chuckle. Quietly.

  After Mom assures Dad that Cocoa is doing okay, he heads off to his meeting at the Quaker worship hall and the rest of us go to lunch at Slim’s Diner.

  Mom must see the questions on my face, because as soon as we sit in our booth she gives me a summary of what Doctor Kersey said—no surprises from the lab tests and X-rays, which mostly confirmed what he’d found earlier. There are some irregularities in blood counts and blood chemistry, but he feels the numbers will improve with better nutrition and clean air. He still doesn’t accept her story of coming from a ruined future earth, but he can’t explain how she has the lungs of a seventy-year-old smoker.

  His prescribes healthy eating, exercise, sleep with an open window so the desert air can come in, and, last but not least, cod liver oil daily.

  “You’ll love it,” I tell Cocoa. “Nothing better than rancid fish oil in the morning.”

  “It’s not that bad, Bobby,” Mom says.

  “Hold your nose and pretend it’s honey,” I say. “Just don’t think about the ocean.”

  Cocoa ends the discussion. “At least it’s not shark liver oil.”

  “I wonder if Pete’s heard anything,” I say.

  “He’ll call, one way or another,” Mom says.

  “Doctor Kersey listened to my story more closely this time, Dottie,” Cocoa says. “Did you notice?”