Yet here she is, he thinks, bewildered. She was nearby me all the time and we didn’t know. So young, like something he can bite into, taste the sweet syrup. His breath surges, his mind races with anger, love, hate, amazement—and abject confusion. He sways slightly, then catches himself.
Elspeth quickly notices Charlie and turns to Owen. “Is this the kid you told us about?” There is something unusual about the way she turns to Owen and then back to Charlie.
Owen nods nervously, plainly embarrassed. His beret wobbles. Something behind Owen’s eyes knows that he is a clown fish among sharks.
Elspeth strides forward, her eyes evaluating Charlie. “What’s your name, kid?” She asks the question, but Charlie senses that she already knows the answer.
“Uh, Charlie.” He blushes and hates himself for it. Still, it helps him stay in character until he gets the feel of these people.
Elspeth smiles slightly, the haughty curl of her lip telling him that she already is quite sure that she holds Charlie’s entire being in her hands. “Welcome! The revolution needs recruits. We can use another comrade.”
The other revolutionaries support this declamation with effusive nods and indistinct mumbles. “We’re basically a student rights organization,” Owen says. “Rights” was a big Leninist-front word, Charlie recalls, and loses all respect for Owen at that moment.
Clearly, Elspeth leads this desultory group, which would be nothing without her. She radiates energy and confidence, a commanding aura. He found it a heady lure in his first life, and it is just as powerful now. But he wonders why she is so interested in him, a kid from a local high school.
Elspeth takes her magnetic gaze off Charlie, gestures toward a frayed Queen Anne chair, and resumes chairing the meeting. “Owen, what have we pulled together for our anti-Johnson rally tomorrow?”
Owen looks around the table nervously, his eyes briefly lighting upon Charlie, who looks away pointedly. “We have arranged for two cadres to march in front of city hall, uh, Comrade. They have already made placards and banners. They only await our word.”
Light seems to radiate outward from Elspeth, illuminating the transfixed faces of her drones. Charlie sees, finally and clearly, that he was her drone too, convenient, pliant, and adoring, a mere dog to her wolf bitch. Now he is faced with his past, or his future, in a way that he didn’t expect. This is truly a new world, a world with marvels that he barely tasted last time.
* * *
At the end of the boring meeting, Elspeth gathers up her keys and a camouflaged ammunition bag. Charlie realizes that it must be her purse. The bag hangs heavily on her small shoulder, a striking contrast to her light-yellow minidress. The weight shows off the tight muscles beneath Elspeth’s soft skin. Charlie longs to touch it again. But loathes the feeling too.
“Kid, come with me. I want to learn some more about you.” She points the way with her sharp nose.
Charlie follows Elspeth down the stairs, his head full of questions. Outside in the cold of the parking lot, in their parkas, one of the men calls out to Elspeth in a slightly Spanish-tinged accent. “Comrade, do you need a ride?”
“That’s okay, Tocayo. Charlie will take me home. We need to talk.”
The shadowy figure gets into his Buick and drives off. Charlie watches the car purr off into the night. There was something odd about the Latino.
“Which car is yours?” Elspeth asks abruptly, derailing Charlie’s rumination.
“Uh, over here.” Charlie walks over to the Dodge Dart, unlocks the passenger door, holds it open for her. She gets in without a word.
Charlie’s car reaches the street and he stops. “Turn right,” she says.
Charlie nods slowly and drives on. He feels the reins and the bridle back on him. They feel good and they feel bad, and he isn’t sure what he wants. He thinks of Trudy momentarily, but it is like he is forty-eight again, and Trudy is only a distant memory. He is with Elspeth once more, and she has never been more attractive to him than now, sleek and young and powerful, a goddess to be followed into battle, her bare breasts swinging with her sword as she hacks her enemies apart.
“What do you take in high school?” she asks.
Charlie laughs to himself. Like I give a damn right now? But he decides to treat Elspeth like anyone else in 1968. At the edge of his consciousness is the intuition that he may now have an advantage over Elspeth, that her mastery might not be quite so complete this time.
“The usual stuff. History, English, you know the drill.”
Something about the way he answers the question sparks her interest. “Have you visited the society yet?”
“What society?”
She blinks. “Nothing. Forget about it.”
When they get to Elspeth’s brownstone, she tells him to park his car. He obeys without question, suspecting what her next step is going to be.
Inside the apartment Elspeth makes them tea. Jasmine, her usual, thinks Charlie. He smiles ruefully while her back is turned. But his body is sending him strong instructions. Somehow Elspeth’s familiar-but-fresh anatomy is still a favorite back in 1968, even without makeup or contact lenses. She will be much more glamorous in the 1980s, but now she obviously doesn’t need glamour, or want it. A familiar reek rises from her as she opens a bottle of red wine, a cheap Spanish. The wine bespeaks seduction.
She sits down and pulls her chair close to him.
“Do you like girls, Charlie?”
He hesitates.
“Of course you do. You probably have a cute little suburban girlfriend who goes down on you on Saturday nights but is saving her virginity for that big wedding night. Am I right?” She downs a glass of wine and pours him one as well. Jasmine aroma on soft air, mixed with sharp rotgut red. Charlie doesn’t dare contradict her but doesn’t feel any need to either. She sniffs. “Of course I am.” She reaches out and feels his burgeoning bicep with her strong fingers. “You look good to me, Charlie.” A pause. “I want to fuck you.”
He marvels at the brazen power play. She thinks he’s a kid, so she can skip the stylish stuff.
She fills the gap. “Can I fuck you, Charlie?”
6 Grit rasps in Charlie’s shoes. He trudges through the desert alone, throat dry, condors circling high above. His friend has already died, lips swollen and tongue leathery. No more water. He can see a highway far ahead and to the right, but he knows he can’t go to it. Not for another ten miles at least, maybe more.
Then, in a jagged lurch, he is shuffling into the old adobe house, home. Hunger gnaws at him. Muscles ache from his day’s work at the shoe factory. The door creaks behind him and he hears a rustle just before he sees his mother sitting at a little wooden table between the grimy stove and their small living area. There is something covering her plate.
“Beans, chiquito, we only have beans tonight,” she croaks in Spanish, yet he can understand. But he can smell the meat that she has been eating. His mother swallows guiltily and gets up quickly.
The scene jumps, flickers, wrenches—
And now he is only a little boy, but his father is beating a cane hard against his bare feet and thighs. He cries, but his father just laughs.
Another jump, the scene spiraling away, the terror of falling—
Charlie rises from the bed, opening his gummy eyes. His bladder hurts. He stumbles around the bare room. Elspeth watches him but says nothing.
He smacks into the doorframe and finds the bathroom, snaps on the light. His head pounds. He lets fly into the toilet but something isn’t right. The bathroom flickers. His face in the mirror is distorted, the skin brown, the shadow of a thick mustache playing on his upper lip. He closes his swollen eye.
The desert is closing in on him. He lies facedown on the hot sand, next to a creosote bush. A scorpion hustles past his eyes but is not interested, keeping its claws up, its tail darting slightly, the poison tip glistening in the noon glare. The scorpion, the scorpion.
He feels his life sweep away from him, his stomach lurches, he
is falling—and he is back being beaten by his father, feet and thighs, feet and thighs, stinging. The laughter.
Charlie’s head spins. He holds on to the porcelain.
He is in a room, a cheap hotel room. Hard, ceramic light everywhere. On top of the TV lies a hypodermic syringe and some ampules, one used up. He knows that they mean release, no pain, no pain. Bliss . . .
A gun gleams on the bedside table.
He picks up the chrome revolver, flips the chamber open, sees a brass round ready to go, clicks the chamber back into place. His thumb pushes the safety off. He puts the muzzle into his mouth, his full white mustache between the steel and his nose. He doesn’t even hear the blast as his brain stem blows apart.
A merciful second of blank nothing washes over him. Then—
Dark pressure sweeps over him and pushes down. Blunt force swarms up in him, darkness, darkness. Charlie slips on the cold tile floor, his balls smacking down first, then his thigh crushing them as the rest of his weight hits the hard surface and rolls. The pain is a red sword against the billowing blackness. Charlie rolls onto his chest, hitting his head on the toilet bowl. Where am I?
Elspeth turns on the light. “Tocayo?” Charlie wonders what she is talking about. Hasn’t he heard her say that before? He turns on her with a fierce frown.
He asks blearily, “What?”
“Oh,” says Elspeth. She shrugs. “Not this time.” She turns to go back to bed.
Charlie pulls himself up using the toilet seat. Maybe she gave him something? Or it’s a side effect of . . . what?
Slowly he composes himself, and an undertow of fatigue starts to seep back into his body. He urinates again and it stings, biting at him suddenly, so that he gasps. He drinks a glass of water and staggers to bed. This time sleep is dreamless and kind.
* * *
When Charlie wakes up again, he lies cold and alone in Elspeth’s bed. The old brass-frame piece creaks, shining in morning light, surrounded by piles of books and papers. He has to shake off the memory of the night’s dark episode. He wonders if he is back in another hallucination, if he will go to some other place or time. Then he realizes why he has woken up. Elspeth is yelling at him from the living room.
“Holy fuck! Charlie, get your little white ass in here right now.”
Charlie lurches into the living room naked, his mind churning. Elspeth, naked, doesn’t look up. “McCarthy almost beat Johnson! The revolution is coming! That fat old Democrat is going down. The country’s going to leave Vietnam.”
She bounces up from the sofa, throws her arms around his neck, and kisses him. She runs her hands down his beautifully muscled chest, then grabs his cock with her right hand. But Charlie pulls back.
She glances angrily up at him. “Don’t do that, Charlie.”
“I have to get back home. My parents will be worried about me.”
“Your parents? Your fucking parents! Your old life is over, and you’re worried about your parents?” The familiar storm cloud gathers on her face.
Your old life is over. . . . What could she mean? Just this political stuff? Or something else?
He shakes his head. Mostly he wants to think about the nightmares. If they were nightmares and not some other reality he was slipping into. Some place that’s a brutal desert, and . . . he wants to blow his brains out.
“Okay, you can fuck right off, you stupid little schoolboy. Scoot back to your white-bread suburb.”
Charlie searches for his clothes while Elspeth rants. At least he knows how to deal with her caws. He’s had years of practice not listening to her. Besides, he is sure that all will be forgiven within a week or two. That was Elspeth’s way.
Not this time, Elspeth. He wants to get away from the apartment, away from the night’s evil dreams.
* * *
Pulling into the driveway of his parents’ home, lips pressed white, Charlie knows his mother is waiting for him alone. Not from memories of Charlie One, but from intuition. His father is away at the office. Charlie parks his car and pats it fondly, knowing that he won’t be driving it again for a while. His teenage hangover pounds at his temples.
His mother stands in the kitchen smoking, something she did only when she was under stress. She smoked a lot when his father died.
Charlie walks toward her with heaviness in his lungs. His hatred for cigarettes is particularly strong when his mother smokes.
“I’m so disappointed in you, Charles.” Her voice trembles with anger and sorrow.
“I know, Mom.”
“I know that you were at a political meeting with one of your schoolteachers, what’s his name?”
“Mr. Owen.”
“I don’t care. I don’t like people like that. We’re Democrats—we support the president. We don’t need those troublemakers.”
She seems to expect a response, but Charlie has no idea what would be the best thing to say to reassure her. She wouldn’t respond well to the idea that smoking was far more important to her future than her political opinions.
“Your father and I have spoken on the phone, and we have agreed that we don’t want you to get involved in politics while you’re still in high school.” A frown, an anxious drag on the Lucky Strike. “I know we talked about you volunteering to work for the McCarthy campaign”—the event that took him to the streets of Chicago in the summer of 1968 and then on to a life of radical pointlessness—“but we can’t let you do that now. You could get into trouble, and then where would you go for college?”
“Yes, I—”
“Don’t interrupt me, Charlie. You can’t use your car for the rest of the month. And if we catch you going off with Mr. Owen again”—her voice betrays bitterness—“we won’t let you have it back.”
In the silence that follows, Charlie relives his arrest with the other demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention, the arrival of his parents at the jail, his mother’s worry, his father’s anger, the fights that he had with them. He isn’t going to go that route this time. What would be the point?
He speaks very softly, watching smoke curl up like a funeral pyre. “Okay, Mom. I’ll behave myself.”
* * *
It goes well for the next few days. Charlie relaxes into the era, listening to the music; staying up late with no ill effect; relishing the whoosh of air in young lungs as he runs, the snap of biting an apple, the fat richness of savory cheese on a double burger, wind rushing in his hair with his head stuck out the car window; cackling like a loon at Laugh-In. He returns to the warmth of it all and it soothes him like a hot tub. The nightmares don’t return.
He thinks up a new aphorism to describe his Charlie Two life: You are only young twice, but you can stay immature indefinitely. He feels a deep rush of gratitude that this is actually, incredibly so.
Watching TV with his dad that Thursday, he sits through a Fred Astaire movie. Dad is surprised that Charlie likes it so much, especially the dancing on the ceiling. Charlie blurts out, “Wow! To do that with no FX!”
His father skews his mouth, puzzled. “What?”
“Uh, with no effects. I mean, special effects.”
“Looked pretty special to me. They did it by rotating the room.”
Maybe this is his destiny. Some Hindu cycle nobody thought of. Or that guy Everett. Or maybe if he doesn’t get this right, he’ll go back to being a frog. Or worse, an associate professor. Fate.
* * *
Trudy picks Charlie up in her father’s car on Friday night. She isn’t pleased. She goes to a girls’ private high school, and 1968’s political ferment has yet to touch her oatmeal world. To her, Charlie’s Tuesday night with Mr. Owen seems deeply suspicious, possibly—did she dare think it?—homosexual.
Charlie plays it appropriately remorseful, the very model of contrition. “I was all alony by the telephony,” she says, which he finds endearing. He promises her nothing like it will happen again. To himself he wonders if he can really fulfill his promises to his parents and to Trudy. Then he abrup
tly decides—Sure, easy. But he wonders what he will do if Elspeth comes looking for him.
They go to see The Graduate at the local movie theater. Though he knows that Trudy talks in public as if she is still a Doris Day virgin, he can tell that she is turned on by the sex. It’s her rapt stillness, eyes filled with the screen, and the way her flesh seems to breathe. Later, in her father’s car, she rides him hard until she comes.
Slumping on him, covered in sweat, she giggles. “You know I can’t stay mad at you for long, Charlie.” She sighs a long, cool breath of Coke and popcorn. “That was . . . wonderful.”
* * *
Charlie is walking over to James’s place after school when Elspeth pulls up in a noisy red Beetle. She stops next to him, opens the door, and whistles. Charlie stops, wondering what to do.
“Get your ass in here, cutie-pie!”
He gets into the car reluctantly.
Elspeth radiates joyous triumph. “Ah, my little hunk of jailbait. You can call me Mrs. Robinson.”
They don’t talk much while Elspeth hunts for an obscure place to park. It isn’t easy, trucks honk at them as she changes lanes too quickly, but finally she comes upon an alleyway behind a TV repair joint.
She goes down on him briskly, swift and slippery, swallowing his come within seconds. Then she swings her legs up around him and shoves her pussy in his face. She comes in a few minutes, the whole length of her body jerking spasmodically.
Elspeth relaxes for a few seconds and then gets back into the driver’s seat. “Where can I drop you off, little boy?” The hardness in her voice repels him.
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