A Gift of Time

by Merritt, Jerry

  Even with eighty years of experience under my belt, I didn’t quite know what to say next. After an uneasy silence that went on far too long, I said, “I was wondering if Arlen was going to practice with me some more this afternoon.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” The shadowy figure made a disgusting hacking sound followed by a watery sniff. “He’s out back somewhere.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I made my way through clumps of cane growing wild in the side yard. Broken farm implements lay scattered in the weeds. An ancient tractor evenly coated in rust sat on flat tires next to the entrance to an old lathe house. I peered in under overhanging scuppernong vines and noticed a footpath winding through the undergrowth. At the other end of the path I found Arlen sitting on a block of broken concrete. He turned around with a start as I stepped out next to him. At the same time, the battered, old cat he had been feeding out of a can bolted for the brush.

  “Oh, hi, Cage.”

  So we were on a diminutive name-sharing basis now. Arlie and Cage. I was still a little uncomfortable about what I might be getting into and hoped I had the maturity now to handle whatever came up. The cat hobbled back to Arlie a few seconds later and I noticed it was missing a front leg. It seemed to be well fed, though.

  “What happened to your cat’s leg?”

  “Shot off.” Arlie scratched the cat’s mangled ears to the accompaniment of a deep rumbling purr.

  “Shot off? Who shot it off?”

  “Daddy.”

  That brought me up short for several heartbeats as my mind struggled to fit that piece of information into my perception of the shadow I had seen behind the screen door. I finally regained my composure.

  “Your dad shot your cat’s leg off?” I managed to get it all out in a level voice.

  “He was a stray coming through the yard. Daddy thought he was after the chickens. I nursed him back though. I take care of him now.”

  Well, that made some sort of twisted sense. I calmed down a bit. “What’s his name?”

  “Tripod.” Arlie offered Tripod another spoonful of Puss-n-Boots but he turned away and rubbed against Arlie’s legs. Arlie pressed the aluminum foil top back on the can and stood up brushing his hands off.

  “So, are we going to practice some more this afternoon?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if it’ll do any good, Cage. I’m pretty much just a klutz.”

  “You’re a lot better than you were when you showed up this morning. Trust me. It’s just a matter of practice until your premotor cortex takes over and does the work for you.”

  “My what?” Arlie squinted at me in puzzlement.

  “Your brain. It’s all in your brain. That’s what I meant to say. Once we get the catching and throwing part down, we can start batting practice. At least get your swing more coordinated. It might be a few weeks before you can hit the ball but at least you’ll look better at bat when you strike out.”

  “Well, that’s something, I guess.” Arlie leaned down and stroked Tripod’s back before committing. “Okay, I’m game if you are. I just don’t want to waste any more of your time. That’s all.”

  That evening after dinner I retired to the Spartan ambience of my spare bedroom study and knocked out my homework in about ten minutes. I thought about going over the financial page in the newspaper again but the incident with the plate number on the old Packard at Arlie’s now occupied my mind. I had been a capable mathematician. You had to be to get a PhD in physics. But that license number was beyond anything I should have been able to do. It was reminiscent of stories I had read about the Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who had possessed the intuitive ability to see connections between concepts that often took other mathematicians of the highest caliber months to grasp. But he had claimed his insights were revealed to him by the Hindu goddess Namagiri.

  Then I remembered Jimmy’s payment from Ell. The ability to do math at an advanced level. He had been amazed at the result. And Ell had said she had given me a small present I should use wisely. But why would she give me the same gift she gave Jimmy? Was Ell my Hindu goddess? I had never needed to do math any more advanced than differential equations. And I almost never needed that. But obviously something had been added to my abilities during the download.

  I leaned back in my chair and called up a few old math problems from college. Much of what I had not been able to recall over the years had been freshened during the download. I guessed the memories had always been there but down pathways no longer accessible in an eighty-year-old brain. Now those pathways were freshly laid with a vibrancy I had not noticed until now. I ran through some Laplace transforms on 3rd order differential equations then derived some catenary curves for hanging chains as a function of the hyperbolic cosine. It was all crystal clear. It required no more effort to understand than reading a simple sentence.

  Was there a reason Ell had done this? Did she know or suspect something? Some problem I would run into where I would need to do advanced math? It seemed unlikely, but now that I had discovered this new capability, I couldn’t leave it alone. It was too wonderful.

  I rummaged around in the desk drawers and found a sheaf of old stationery. A few minutes later I had the top sheet covered with formulas I recalled from Relativity 301. I studied them for a few seconds. They were almost self-evident to me now. I jotted down a few more equations from quantum mechanics, found a small box of thumbtacks, and started to pin the paper to the floral wallpaper over my desk. Then, thinking better of it, I just slid the paper to the bottom of the sheaf and stuck it back in the drawer. I was tired and it was time to turn in. Arlie and I had more practice in the morning.

  Chapter 14

  The winter months flew by. Arlie and I never got around to going camping across the river but he was getting about average on batting and catching. He should have been. We had practiced almost every day. I had included my brother, Joey, in the catch sessions. At five, Joey was a reasonable match for Arlie, so I just let the two of them pitch the ball back and forth while I practiced batting pinecones out into the street. I had also started us on a regimen of pushups and sit-ups and we had made some barbells out of tin cans and cement with pieces of broomstick for handles. In February we added running a half-mile a day up River Road to our program and were doing two miles by spring. It was more exercise than I had ever done in my life on my first time through.

  But I was not making any progress on getting an investment program underway. Dad had been intrigued by my recommendations on Holiday Inn stocks. He could have made seven percent on his money by spring if he had bought the stock, but he didn’t have money to risk in the stock market, he said. He had responsibilities. So it was going to be up to me to raise some capital.

  This, however, turned into a much more difficult problem than I had anticipated. I was too young to get a real job. About all that was open to me was collecting old bottles for their two-cent deposit or operating a lemonade stand, and neither would make enough to be worthwhile. There was just no demand for a ten-year-old with a PhD in physics in Stubbinville, Florida.

  Then I recalled I could fix stuff. And television was just coming into its own. Several people in town already had a TV. It took some skill to set up the antennas and run the connections. Kid’s stuff for a physicist, though. And when those TVs went on the fritz, they weren’t going to fix themselves. I knew ninety percent of the problems were going to be faulty vacuum tubes. And most of the rest would be obvious: a blown fuse, a loose wire, or a burned out resistor with a black smudge around it saying, “Here’s the problem.” Same for radios, of which there were probably several thousand in the area. A supply of assorted tubes and resistors and a soldering iron and I would be in business. But I needed seed money to get started.

  I thought then of all of those lawnmowers rusting away under the eaves over at Arlie’s. I could fix those too. With lawnmowers it was usually a problem of a gummed up sparkplug, or stuck carburetor float, or using last year’s gas. I realized mowing season was
just around the corner. It was time to get busy. But it would mean finally meeting Arlie’s dad up close. Until now he had remained a shadowy figure behind the screen door of my imagination.

  My trepidations about the man weren’t dispelled when I met him face to face in Arlie’s flophouse-themed living room. I glanced about warily as the screen door closed behind me. The place was fairly well picked up, but the furniture looked like it had been found on the side of the road. Brown water stains festooned the plaster ceiling and made tentative explorations down the peeling, greenish wallpaper toward the floor. A floor that had been quite nice at one time. It was oak plank. But the finish was long gone and the wood worn and gray in most areas. As I puzzled over the source of a musty odor, a throaty snort from the corner caught my attention. “Daddy” lay sprawled across a dingy, mustard-yellow chair. His sweat-stained undershirt accented the chair’s upholstery. Bare feet followed the color motif sprouting yellowed toenails that might, in a bind, serve as lethal weapons. A battered straw hat covered his face. He stirred from his nap with a small jolt as Arlie called out, “Daddy, can Cage and me fix up those old lawnmowers out front and sell them?”

  Daddy snatched his hat off and I made a small sound in my throat before I could stop myself. All of his features were crammed into the bottom half of his skull like a distorted reflection in a fun house mirror. It crossed my mind he would have to exercise some degree of caution wielding a dinner fork. His eyes peered out from a scant two inches above his mouth. This, of course, left him with a high expanse of bulging forehead. He must have had an enormous brain but there was no projection of high intelligence about him, though he did exhibit a certain air of arrogant slyness.

  “What?”

  “Can Cage and me fix those old lawnmowers and sell them?”

  Those low-cast eyes swung toward me and locked. They knew this was my idea.

  “Ain’t yours to sell…, Arlen.”

  “But they’re just out there rusting away, Daddy. We might be able to fix them,” Arlie persisted.

  To my considerable relief, Daddy’s eyes gimbaled back toward Arlie.

  “You woke me up to ask me that? Arlen, ain’t none of them worked in years. But if you think you can fix ‘em, have at it. Might as well learn early. You can’t make a turd back into a ham sandwich.” He dropped his hat back over his face. “Now git!”

  And with no further hesitation, we both shot out the screen door to pick out a turd.

  Tripod was sitting next to one of the mowers and we both took that to be a good omen. We selected one more that looked most likely to have some life left in it and pulled both out into the front yard.

  “Let’s push them up to my house to work on them.” I was pretty sure if Old Man Quintin heard one of them start he’d change his mind about letting us sell them on our own. Plus I didn’t want to hang around him any more than I had to. My heart was sick that Arlie had to live there with him.

  The first lawnmower just had a stuck carburetor float. I cleaned the carburetor thoroughly and bolted it back on. Then I changed the oil and added a quart of fresh gas. It still wouldn’t start so I re-gapped the sparkplug and squirted a little gas into the cylinder. It fired on the first pull. Arlie couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d snatched a live rabbit out of the gas tank.

  “Clean that one up, Arlie, and we’ll paint over the rusted handle and see if we can sell it.”

  I turned my attention to the second mower. It had a frozen piston. I recalled once seeing a college buddy use automatic transmission fluid and gasoline to unfreeze a piston on an old Norton motorcycle. He had poured the mixture into the cylinder and lit it on fire to free the piston. Dad had a half can of fluid in the garage. An hour later we had the second mower in operation. It was time for batting practice.

  Chapter 15

  By the end of the school year Arlie swung the bat with a grace and ease I would never have imagined possible when we first hooked up. He could hit the ball squarely about a quarter of the time and could catch and throw about as well as any other fifth grader. It was the final ball game of the school year. Arlie was picked last again, out of habit I suppose, but he and I had worked out a plan. It wasn’t a foolproof plan. It wasn’t even a great plan. But it was a plan that had Arlie excited to be playing baseball and that in itself was almost a miracle.

  My order of being chosen moved up and down so that today Arlie and I ended up on the same team. He had already had one turn at bat and struck out. It wasn’t at all a sure thing we had enough time for Arlie to come to bat again, but a rare double play had brought our team out of the field early.

  I managed to get all the way around to second and the next batter got to first but his grounder to the shortstop blocked me from reaching third. We were behind by two runs when Arlie came to bat. He took a couple of practice swings and stepped up to the plate. He swung and missed. Then on the second pitch he pretended to bunt but purposely flubbed the attempt. The pitcher called for the outfield to move in even closer. The other team members taunted him. “No batter, no batter…,” and “Easy out,” and “Where’s your purse, batter?” As Arlie stood alone at the plate, he caught my eye for a second and smiled. Then came the windup and the pitch—a fast ball. The crack of Arlie’s bat left little doubt he had a solid hit but would he fly out? I ran to third where the third base coach was waving me toward home. When I crossed home plate I turned to see where Arlie’s ball had gone. Two outfielders were across the street picking through a cherry laurel hedge. Arlie crossed home plate before they even found the ball.

  We were headed back over to the bench when Miss Patterson called the end of recess. When I glanced over at Arlie to congratulate him, he was walking along head down. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. I touched him on the lower arm and he glanced up at me with tears streaming down his face. He sucked in a ragged breath. “Thanks, Cage. I’ll never forget what you did for me.” I grabbed him around the neck and pulled his head to my chest to give him a noogie so the others wouldn’t see him crying. A minute later we were standing on the field alone. Arlie wiped his eyes with his sleeve and said, “We better get back to class before we get in trouble.”

  Chapter 16

  The first weekend of summer vacation I tried to get Arlie to go camping with me across the river. He seemed fairly interested but said his daddy wouldn’t let him.

  “Why not?” I asked in typical ten-year-old fashion. I was finding it hard to think of myself as an eighty-year-old anymore and often dropped back to the routines already in me before the download.

  “He says I spend too much time with you as it is.”

  I found an unreasonable hatred for Old Man Quintin rising in me. He was anathema to Arlie’s wellbeing but Arlie was his son and lived in his house and ate his food. It was frustrating, but there was nothing I nor anyone else, for that matter, could do about it.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I was looking forward to us cooking out and sleeping in a tent and swimming in the river this summer.”

  “Yeah, me too. But we still have our lawnmower business don’t we? We got twenty dollars each for those two lawnmowers and I figure we can probably repair one or two of the others if Daddy doesn’t find out we’re actually selling them.”

  “That’s not much money, though. Forty bucks. I don’t think lawnmower repair by itself will do the trick for us. We need to expand into radio and television repair as well.”

  Arlie snapped his head around toward me in disbelief. “Television. We can’t fix one of those. I’ve never even seen one except in pictures. And I don’t have any idea how to fix a busted radio. Heck, I didn’t know how to fix the lawnmowers. You did that.”

  “Relax. I’ll show you. It’s like baseball. Easy once you know how.”

  “So where did you learn all this stuff? You’ve lived here in Stubbinville just like me. And I’m not even sure there are any televisions in Stubbinville.”

  “There are. I know of two. I’ve spotted the aerials. But ther
e will be more before the summer’s out. We just need to get ourselves established as the ones to come to when they quit working.” As usual, I hadn’t answered his direct question but Arlie never pushed the issue. He needed a friend more than he needed answers.

  ***

  Mom was against me going camping across the river by myself, but Dad was a former Boy Scout and thought it was a great idea. He took me out to the garage and had me climb up a rickety, paint-spattered stepladder into the dry heat of the loft.

  “You should see an old, tan duffel bag up there somewhere. Pull it out.”

  It was all the camping stuff a ten-year-old could ever want. An Army pup tent with a ground cloth, tent pegs, a sleeping bag, an official Boy Scout cook kit, backpack, the works. Even the eighty-year-old man inside me got a thrill at seeing the stuff of a kid’s dreams. Then farther back was his old scout uniform. I pulled it out and shook it open.

  “Wow, Dad. You were an Eagle Scout?”

  “Yeah. It’s too bad there’s not a Boy Scout troop in Stubbinville. I think you’d enjoy it.”

  I reached all the way back and pulled out his ancient Boy Scout handbook. Thumbing through it I said, “Everything I need to know should be in here.” I held it up. “Can I keep it for a while? Read through it?”

  “You can have it. I memorized everything in there years ago. Happy reading.”

  And so I was left to sort through another young boy’s life. As I was hauling some of the camping gear from the garage up to my study, I heard a snatch of conversation. Dad was saying, “It’ll be fine. Don’t forget this time last year we were worried about his social detachment and lack of interest in anything.”

  I winced at the thought of what I had been the night of the download. Before the future me came back to take control. My parents had certainly been justified in their apprehensions. But things were different now. I had a mission. Three major problems lay ahead of me. Two of them I could solve. The other I would just have to endure again.