Fifty in Reverse

by Bill Flanagan

  His parents stared at him.

  Peter spoke awkwardly. “Long Beach, Long Island, is where my wife comes from. Came from.”

  His father looked pained.

  Peter said, “She grew up on Sawchuk Road.”

  His mind was carouseling. After he heard the new Beatles song, after Rockefeller died, he had phoned Long Island information looking for the Crowleys on Sawchuk Road in Long Beach and was told by the operator there was no such listing and no such street. That was when he began to accept that the life he remembered was a delusion. What if Sawchuk Road had a different name in 1970? Hope and panic rose in him.

  His parents looked worried.

  He said, “In my dream, my delusion, I married a woman named Janice Crowley from Sawchuk Road in Long Beach, Long Island. I’ve been to her family’s house a hundred times. If we could drive down there…”

  His father said, “Peter, we are not going to drive a hundred and fifty miles looking for—what?”

  “Proof,” Peter said.

  His mother said, “Peter, it wouldn’t change anything.”

  “It’s my wife, Mom! If my wife is alive in this… reality, I have to know it! And if she exists, if there is a Janice Crowley in Long Beach and her father, Gus, is a cop and her mom, Virginia, works at the local junior college and her brother, Tim, is studying to become an ophthalmologist—if all that turns out to be true, doesn’t it prove that I really have traveled here from later?”

  Howard said, “You know that the world isn’t how you expected it to be. It’s not how you remembered it. Let’s be patient, Pete. Give me the information and I’ll make some calls.”

  Peter said, “If it turns out my wife is alive…”

  “It wouldn’t put you back in the twenty-first century,” his mother said. “They wouldn’t even know you.”

  Peter said hopefully, “Unless Janice came back too.”

  “She’d have found you. We’re easy to find.”

  “Her dad was an undercover detective in 1970.” Peter’s voice was rising. “Of course they had an unlisted number.”

  “You’re reaching, Pete,” his father said.

  Peter regretted upsetting them. They could do nothing to help, and he was a fool to reveal his thoughts.

  His mother said, “Remember what we talked about, Peter. Don’t call attention.”

  Peter stopped talking about it. He finished his homework and went to his room. He set up the small portable electric typewriter his sister Cathy had left behind when she got married. He carefully typed out transfers of copyright on “Racing in the Street” and “Wildflowers” to Wendy DeVille of 486 Buttongreen Lane, Bethlehem, Rhode Island. He got a second sheet of paper and signed over “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” and “School’s Out” to Barry, Ronald, and Richard DeVille. Then he typed up a third page giving title to the original composition “Afternoon Delight” to Daphne Burrows. He found three envelopes and addressed them.

  At breakfast he asked his father to witness the documents and stamp them with his notary seal. His father figured it was no stranger than most of what his son did lately.

  Peter stopped at a mailbox across from the school and dropped in the envelopes.

  He went to his morning classes. He didn’t raise his hand. He did nothing to call attention to himself. In the hallway outside the cafeteria he stopped his friend John North, who was carrying the newly arrived West Bethlehem Veterans Memorial High School yearbook.

  “John,” he said, “I know I’ve been acting weird lately. This is going to seem strange too. I want to write something in your yearbook.”

  John North handed over the book. Peter flipped to the faculty section and wrote over the photo of Mr. Mosspaw: “Microsoft. Apple. Amazon. Google.” He handed the yearbook back to John North and said, “Remember those names. In the years to come, if you see new companies with those names starting up, buy stock. Tell Mr. Mosspaw too. I wouldn’t steer you wrong.”

  Peter ate lunch alone. He ate something that was supposed to be macaroni. He saw Delores with the smile buttons on a stepladder hanging posters for the prom. Mina Habib was yelling up at her, demanding that all proms be canceled in honor of the Kent State victims.

  When the bell rang, Peter took back his tray and walked out of the high school. He headed directly to the DeVilles’ house. He knocked on the kitchen door. No one was home. He expected that. Wendy would be at work. The boys could be anywhere. Barry’s ’66 Charger was in the driveway. He was likely wandering the neighborhood, selling drugs or fireworks or otherwise unknitting the social fabric. Peter opened the car door and looked on top of the visor and reached under the seat. He found the keys in the ashtray. Barry was too much of a badass to not leave his keys in the car. Who would fuck with the toughest hood in town? Nobody who ever intended to come back.

  Peter turned over the engine. It made more noise than it needed to. A stick shift; it had been a while. There was an eight-track pushed into the dashboard. Hendrix. “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” Getaway music.

  Peter backed out of the driveway and steered toward the interstate. He had no license. He was driving a stolen car. He was fifteen years old. He was going to New York to find his wife.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Terry Canyon rolled up the Wyatts’ driveway on his Triumph to find Peter’s mother coming out of the house to meet him. She was distraught.

  “Mr. Mosspaw called to say that Peter disappeared from school!”

  Terry turned off his engine and dropped the kickstand. He said, “He might be cutting class. He’s a kid.”

  Joanne Wyatt showed him a note in the boy’s handwriting. I love you, Mom, but I have to go home now. Don’t feel bad. —P.

  “Have you checked with his friends?”

  “I called the DeVilles’ house. Mrs. DeVille said her son’s car was stolen this afternoon right out of their driveway.”

  “You think Peter stole a car? Can he drive?”

  “I didn’t know it, but if he thinks he’s sixty-five…”

  “Where would he go?”

  “He got upset at something on the news last night. He decided that he knew where his wife was living and wanted me to drive him to, to somewhere on Long Island, I think. I can’t remember where.”

  Dr. Terry was thinking in psychiatrist triple speed. Like a tennis pro, he was processing the information flying at him to formulate a useful response. He became aware of a loud engine getting closer. A silver MG sports car was coming up the driveway fast.

  “It’s him!” the mother shouted and ran toward the car. The MG stopped and Wendy DeVille climbed out. She was dressed in the short blue zipper uniform of a dental assistant and matching eye shadow. Neither the mother nor the doctor had any idea who she was.

  Wendy said, “Mrs. Wyatt?”

  The mother thought this new person was a nurse come to tell her horrible news.

  “I’m Wendy DeVille. Ricky’s mother.”

  Relieved and surprised, Joanne Wyatt asked, “Do you know where Peter is?”

  “I have this.” Wendy held out a pocket-size notebook.

  “That’s the journal I gave Peter,” Terry Canyon said.

  Wendy handed it to him. She said, “Are you Peter’s father?”

  “No, I’m Terry Canyon, I’m his… I’m a friend of the family.”

  “Terry Canyon. You’re the psychiatrist.”

  “May I see that?” Joanne Wyatt reached for the journal.

  Wendy said, “Peter writes about his wife’s family’s house in Long Beach, New York. He goes into a lot of detail. I think that might be where he’s gone.”

  Peter’s mother could make no sense of this. Why did this woman know Peter’s secret? How did she get his private journal, and what was she doing reading it? She wished her husband were home. She had left urgent messages at the courthouse and been told the judge was in the middle of an important trial. No doubt it was, she thought. And no doubt it would fall to the mother to save their boy.

  TWENT
Y-NINE

  Barry DeVille’s 1966 Dodge Charger had four bucket seats—three brown, one yellow—a 318-cubic-inch V8 engine, a three-speed floor shifter, and an AM radio. A piece of the floorboard was gone on the passenger’s side. Peter could look over and see the road speeding by through the hole. The car wasn’t old enough to be so thoroughly rusted. The previous owner must have parked it by the ocean all year and never washed off the salt.

  The fuel gauge was under half a tank. Peter had little cash. It comforted him to see 59 CENTS A GALLON posted on the gas stations that he passed. Just over the Connecticut line he went by a speed trap doing seventy-five. The trooper didn’t move. In 1970 you had to hit eighty to get a ticket on Route 95.

  The turnpike was a series of tollbooths and Howard Johnsons. Someday the tolls would be taken out, after too many semis jackknifed on approach. Someday McDonald’s would win the highway concession away from HoJo’s, too. None of that had happened yet. The Hendrix tape was going around for the second time when Peter yanked it out and the radio came on.

  The announcer had big news. Hot off the peace treaty in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger had announced a surprise deal with Red China to recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. Both Chinas would be admitted to the United Nations. It was another foreign policy triumph for the Nixon administration.

  “No no no!” Peter whacked the steering wheel. “That doesn’t happen!”

  He pressed the gas and began to recite memories of his life with Janice. Janice at their wedding reception dancing with her father, Janice on their honeymoon catching a tuna in the Caribbean, Janice riding a bike on Nantucket with Pete Junior in a baby seat. He would not let her go. He would find his way back to her.

  The news said to stand by for Kissinger. Peter punched the button to change the station. A preacher was reading from Psalm 126: “When the Lord brought back the captives of Zion, we were like men dreaming. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with rejoicing.”

  He hit the button again. A buzzing John Lee Hooker riff came out of the static. “When I die, he’s gonna set me up with the spirit in the sky.” Peter decided the radio was talking to him. He drove under a highway bridge and the music faded until he came out the other side.

  He went around a turn coming toward the Mystic exit and a bang rattled the whole automobile, followed by a gruesome scraping sound. Peter looked in the mirror and saw a trail of sparks behind him. He pulled over onto the shoulder and got out, other cars shooting past. A burned black scar on the tar tracked his path. He got down on the ground and peered under the Charger. The rear bolts holding the tailpipe had let go and the pipe was dragging. He got on his back and pushed himself under the car. The undercarriage was rusted through. Even if he’d had bolts and tools, there was nothing to attach the tailpipe to. Barry DeVille’s new acquisition was never going to pass inspection, no matter how much he bribed the mechanic. The boy wiggled out from under the car and opened the trunk. The foot of a jack and no crowbar, a spare tire covered in patches, a spent tube of Super Glue. He sat down by the side of the road and tried to imagine what story he could tell the highway cop who would surely be there within ten minutes unless he figured out a way to get back on the road.

  He had a wide brown belt with a thick buckle around his thin waist. He pulled it off and slid back under the car. He wrapped his belt around the south end of the tailpipe, binding it to the driveshaft. He knew that as soon as the tailpipe heated up it would begin sawing through the leather—but if it held for ninety minutes it would get him to his wife’s house. After that, nothing mattered.

  Thirty miles behind him, his mother’s station wagon was pulling onto the highway. Dr. Terry Canyon sat in the passenger’s seat reading a Texaco map, while behind him Wendy DeVille recited details about the boy’s wife’s family’s house from his pocket journal.

  “He says it’s a three-story house with a detached garage off Beech Street, two blocks from the ocean. It’s got a red roof, but that might be in the future.”

  Peter’s mother gripped the steering wheel with both hands and pushed the accelerator down with her foot.

  Terry Canyon said, “Long Beach looks pretty small. It’s an island. If we can get to New London in forty-five minutes, we can make the next ferry. That will be quicker than going all the way down to the Whitestone Bridge.”

  Joanne Wyatt hit eighty. Dr. Terry said be careful you don’t get a ticket. She said her husband was a judge.

  Dr. Terry turned and looked at Wendy. He said, “Your son flipping out about Peter taking his car?”

  Wendy shook her head. “It doesn’t take much for Barry to flip out. He’s been in and out—” She stopped herself. “He’s had a hard time. His daddy left home when he was small, and he tried to be the man of the house. He didn’t have very good examples.”

  “I can talk to him if you want me to,” Dr. Terry said.

  Wendy looked at him for a moment. She said, “You mean professionally?”

  “Not officially, no,” Terry said. “Does he like motorcycles?”

  “He likes anything fast and loud that he can hurt himself on.”

  “Well, there ya go. Common ground. You have three boys, right?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, maybe one weekend when Pete’s back and Barry’s car is recovered we all go up to Laconia and watch the motorcycle races. Pitch a tent, cook some hot dogs, talk about the world.”

  Wendy was uncertain if this was a generous offer from a professional therapist or a pickup line from a good-looking charmer. Peter’s mother was itching to slam on the brakes and send them both through the windshield, but she forced herself to concentrate on the mission at hand.

  THIRTY

  The fat orange sun was sinking in a gasoline sky when the stolen Charger lurched over the bridge into the hometown of Peter’s wife. He could smell the ocean. Long Beach wasn’t as developed as the picture in his mind, but neither was it suburban. The shingled single-family houses were pushed close together with small yards separated by chain-link barriers and an occasional beat-up picket fence.

  He got turned around looking for landmarks. He was almost clipped by a garbage truck coming down the wrong side of a street that had been one-way in his memory. He pulled over and climbed onto the hood of the car and looked up and down and across the yards and spotted the steeple of a church on the block where his wife grew up. In four minutes he had found her house. He parked across the street and turned off the engine.

  On the small front lawn of her father’s house, Janice Crowley, age ten, was turning cartwheels.

  “She exists,” Peter said out loud. The little girl on the lawn was familiar to him from black-and-white photos in his wife’s family album, from scratchy home movies played on Christmas Day. He was amazed that she was in full color and three dimensions. In every step she took, in every shake of her head, in every wrinkle of her nose, it was Janice. She had come back to him.

  He sat watching her for a long time. He didn’t know what to do next. She ran into the house, and he despaired. Four minutes later she came out again, carrying a green hula-hoop. The streetlights came on. Soon she would disappear back inside. He got out of the car and walked to the edge of the yard.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She looked up at him. She was neither curious nor interested. She said hello and went back to her hula-hoop.

  “You’re pretty good at that,” he said.

  She counted spins: “Eleven, twelve, thirteen…”

  “You’re Janice.”

  She stopped spinning and looked at him.

  “Are Tim and your folks inside?”

  She said, “You know my brother?”

  “Sort of.” He took a step onto the lawn. He was working without a net now. “Do you know me? I’m Peter.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What grade are you in, Janice?”

  “Grade four.”

  A door slammed open and a familiar New York accent demanded, “Hey! Who t
he hell are you?”

  The boy looked around and broke into a grin. “Gus!”

  The compact man was moving toward him, out of the house and across the lawn. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Peter. Peter Wyatt. You look good, Gus! You look so young!”

  In 1970 Gus Crowley was an undercover narcotics officer working around the New York beaches and airports. It was a dangerous job. He wore a walrus mustache and shaggy hair to blend in with the criminals he pursued. He lived with the fear that one of them would learn where he lived and threaten his family. He was always on alert. One look at this kid’s eyes pushed all his panic buttons.

  Gus got close to the boy’s face and said, “Tell me who you are and what you want.”

  Peter couldn’t stop grinning. His wife was real. His remembered life was not a delusion. He looked at his father-in-law and said, “I know this is going to sound crazy, but I’m the man who’s going to marry Janice and be the father of your grandchildren.”

  Gus Crowley brought his left fist into Peter’s right eye. There was a crack. Peter staggered. Gus shouted for Janice to run inside and lock the door. Peter said, “No, Janice! Stay with me!” The cop hit him again and a tooth snapped out of his mouth, root and all. Peter hit the lawn as Gus’s boot broke into his ribs.

  He saw the face of his father-in-law upside down and filled with hatred.

  He heard his mother shouting as Dr. Terry rushed at Gus. The pain drained away as he slipped out of the world.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Dr. Terry Canyon hurled himself at Gus Crowley and they hit the ground hard. The cop was swinging but Terry was six inches taller, fifty pounds heavier, and had the advantage of surprise. He rolled Gus over and sat on his lower back, pinned one arm behind him, and leaned into his ear. “I’m a doctor. That boy is my patient. The woman is his mother. You need to calm the fuck down.”

  Joanne Wyatt was cradling the head of her unconscious son and pressing a kerchief to a wound above his right eye. She ordered Wendy DeVille to go into the house and call an ambulance. “Don’t knock, go right inside!”