Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  A drop of sweat fell on the page. The green line on the readout before him, half obscured by the typed precis, dipped as his pedaling slowed, and a small, tinny female voice admonished, “Your heart rate has fallen below optimum level, Mr. McKay.”

  With an inner sigh McKay cranked harder. I’m the President of the United States, he thought. In two hours I’m going to sign an agreement with Japan that will affect the economy of the entire electronics and automotive industries, and I’m being told to get my fat ass in gear by a microchip.

  Would Sugiyama go for it if I suggested a rider adding a 25 percent import tariff on all electronics devices with snippy little voices?

  The stationary bike achieved the crest of its imaginary hill and the pressure against the pedals slacked. McKay straightened his body—a little paunchy, he thought, but not bad for a fifty-seven-year-old who had a close encounter with a fragmentation grenade in his youth—and dropped his hand to touch the phone clipped to the waistband of his shorts. Throughout his workout he’d been listening for its ring, but he automatically glanced at the light that would have signaled that a call had come in, in case he’d been too preoccupied (With THAT report?) to hear it.

  It was dark. Damn.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  Bilmer should have called by this time.

  Something clutched, tight and cold, behind his sternum. Checked in. Said everything was all right. Said there’s going to be a delay. Said SOMETHING.

  She was a week overdue already.

  And now he was going to have to shower and shave and get ready to meet the Japanese, and if Bilmer’s call hadn’t come in by then, it might make for an extremely awkward conversation when it did. He had no idea what she’d tell him—nor any notion of what or how desperate her circumstances would be. He grinned a little at the mental picture of himself and Sugiyama, an elderly gentleman of enormous dignity, in the Oval Office, surrounded by secretaries and ministers. The President or, worse, the Japanese Trade Liaison picks up his pen to sign . . . oh, ’scuse me a minute, I have to take this call.

  He glanced across the white-tiled basement gym, where his aide Ron Guthrie puffed stoically on a recumbent set to one notch above “coast,” and Secret Service Agent Larry Shango—one of the few who could keep up with McKay on an actual road ride—peddled in his usual ebony silence, a refrigerator in a sweat suit.

  Guthrie? wondered McKay, touching the phone again. But who was to say Guthrie wasn’t in on it?

  Someone close to him was.

  Someone was lying. Someone was covering up. His mind ticked off the men who’d been with him in his Senate years, and down the campaign trail; he felt as he’d felt in the jungles, surrounded by a wall of greenery that could conceal anything.

  And responsible for everyone. Responsible for their lives.

  His glance again caught Shango. It amused McKay a little, that the man would be that invisible.

  Yet that very invisibility, that very quality of being utterly withdrawn from even service politics, added to McKay’s sense that this was a man who could be trusted. If he’d known him longer. . . .

  But he hadn’t. McKay wondered if he’d known anyone long enough.

  Impatient, McKay stepped from the cycle prematurely. He took the private elevator back to the third floor. Officer Shango loomed discreetly behind, then positioned himself outside the residence as McKay went in. Jan, whom McKay had left curled in a sleepy little lump in bed, was now in the Yellow Sitting Room, wrapped in her bathrobe at the cherry-wood breakfast table by the curved windows that overlooked the south lawn. Early morning light made soft chaos of her short, graying blond curls, and she had on her glasses, something she never allowed the Press to see on the grounds that they made her look like an owl, which they did. Coffee perfumed the air. She, too, was perusing the printout of her itinerary for the day, though a carefully printed letter from their son—plus Polaroids of him and his cousins at Jan’s brother’s place in Maine—lay nearby. A treat, McKay guessed, if she was good and read the itinerary first. She looked up at once as he closed the door and asked, “Did you get your call?”

  She’d noticed. Of course, he reflected ruefully, the way he’d been nursing that phone for the past twenty-four hours, she’d have to have been blind not to notice.

  He poured himself coffee and set the phone on the table. Bilmer had mentioned laconically that its number was one of her own, an account taken a month ago with somebody else’s name, not an NSA secured line; this needed to be outside the loop.

  “Not yet. Jan, listen.” He pulled up a chair, and Jimmy, the First Dog as the papers liked to call the big shepherd, moved ten inches from lying next to Jan’s chair to lying next to his. Jan pushed a plate of English muffins at McKay.

  “You remember Agent Bilmer.” He touched the phone lightly with the backs of his fingers.

  “Jerri?” Jan smiled. “Of course. I talked to her again at the fund-raiser last month, which of course was a little awkward, since I know I’m not supposed to ask her what she’s been doing since the campaign. Teaching, I think she said, though goodness knows what the actual story is.”

  McKay remembered a dozen nights or a hundred, on the campaign trail, when Jan would come out with some astonishing piece of information about load-vs.-weight ratios of semiautomatic weapons or what Richard Nixon’s Secret Service detail had called him in the duty room, courtesy of Jerri Bilmer. One night Bilmer had showed Jan how to conceal a weapon in a bikini. That had been some demo.

  McKay drew a deep breath. “She’s going to call sometime this morning—I hope she’s going to call,” he revised. “I don’t have time to explain to you what’s going on, partly because I don’t know. Who’s in on it, who can be trusted . . .”

  Jan, who’d started to hand him the letter from Ricky, set it down again, and he saw the shift in her eyes as she processed what he’d said. “The CIA? Or people like Steve and Nina?” She named two of the White House aides who’d been with them longest. “Who’s in on what?”

  McKay thought about the small fragments of facts, the odd discrepancies in reports from the supposedly routine project that had caused him to meet with Bilmer in the Rose Garden.

  At length he said, “I don’t know. Bilmer is trying to find out for me. She was supposed to call a week ago.”

  “I see.” Jan nudged her coffee cup out of the way of her elbow. “Sort of.”

  “And if her call comes in, I can’t take it during the meeting with Sugiyama.”

  A small, amused crease tucked into the corner of Jan McKay’s mouth. “But you figure I can say, ‘Oh, excuse me, girls.’ ” She went into her Gracie Allen voice and fluttered her hands. And then, sobering, “What do I say?”

  “Tell her I said that she can trust you. Do whatever she says, make whatever arrangements she asks for, to get her and her information here as fast as possible without being seen. And notify me the second I’m out of that damn meeting.”

  Jan was silent for a time, toying with the edge of the Polaroid. Dense tall pines, blue sky, a joyous nine-year-old boy and two small girls at the lake’s rim with Secret Service Agent Minsky hovering behind. Early sunlight sparkled on the coffee things; it was so quiet McKay could hear the roar of the mowers out on the lawn. Among the gilt porcelain cups and bright orange day-lilies the small gray telephone stood up like a stubby tower.

  “It’s that bad?”

  He sighed. “It could be. And it could be nothing. I’m pretty sure now that every report I’ve received about the Source Project has been a carefully fabricated lie, but I don’t know who’s doing the fabrication. Or at what level. Or why. I hope I’ll find out when she gets here.”

  “And after that?”

  McKay shook his head. Dismissals, maybe. A shakeup in the Pentagon. Maybe a scandal, at best. At worst . . .

  He shivered despite the summer warmth and forced a smile. “That’s another thing I don’t know.” He picked up his son’s letter and headed for the dressing room to make himself ready
for whatever the day would bring.

  Chapter Three

  WEST VIRGINIA—7:52 A.M. EDT

  At the velvety, experimental touch on her cheek, Wilma Hanson opened her eyes. Paws tucked up neatly under him, Sebastian was sitting on her chest.

  She sighed. “Good morning, Sebastian.”

  She had long suspected the big cinder-gray tom of watching for the first movement of her eyelids. Most mornings, her first awareness—even before the whistle went off at the mine on the other side of town—was of Sebastian’s hefty weight walking up the length of her body and settling himself on her chest, and then, if she didn’t respond, putting out a paw and tapping her nose. Breakfast?

  The purring in her ear informed her that Dinah had returned to being a hat, sleeping on the pillow just above Wilma’s head. And that soft little rumble at her right hip would be Imp. “I suppose it could be worse,” she said aloud and made a move to turn over. Sebastian climbed down, offended, and leaped gracefully off the bed, followed immediately by Rhubarb, Anastasia, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mortimer and Spartacus. “I could have St. Bernards.” She put on her bathrobe and padded to the kitchen, trailed by the rest of the gang: O’Malley, Isabella, Theodora, Clinton, Fish and Tara of Helium. Dinah remained where she was, for she was old and arthritic, but she mewed to remind Wilma that she wanted breakfast, too.

  The house on Applby Lane was old, the kitchen large. Back when there’d been any money in the family—or in Boone’s Gap—there hadn’t been such a thing as air-conditioning. Wilma had left the door onto the sun porch open last night, and the room was drenched with early sun and the scent of morning, the fresh tingle of the air still bearing the scent of mountains and the woods. When she was a girl growing up in this house—back when dinosaurs walked the earth—the woods had been right out the backyard, and she and her tribe of sisters sat on the steps and watched the fireflies on hot summer nights. During the coal boom of the seventies the Applby Mining Corporation had put a trailer park there for its workers, and about three-quarters of the spaces were still occupied, mostly by retirees. There was a little shopping center just beyond.

  Even so, you could still smell the woods on a summer morning.

  Wilma smiled, a tall, rangy, gray-haired woman in a pink chenille robe, and knelt to portion out can after can of Friskies onto fourteen plates. The eight o’clock whistle blew at the mine, a groaned carpe diem—summer half over, and what had she done of all she’d planned to do before kids came back to her classroom in the fall? Four sisters yet to write those long letters to—though of course Hazel was of the opinion that all of them should get computers and communicate by e-mail. Weeds luxuriated between the long rows of berry canes across the back of the enormous yard. Many, many books yet unread. She’d kept up her work at the Senior Center, that was something. But mostly she’d just walked the green Allegheny trails to this or that hidden hollow, to spend a magic afternoon listening to folks sing old songs, tell old tales. She’d worked some on her weaving, relaxing into the rhythmic thump of the huge loom Hazel had built her in the living room, the cats all watching in fascination and reaching hesitant paws out to catch the shuttle.

  Time and summer, like shining gold cupped in her hands.

  Her smile faded a little as she thought of her pupils. Not so happy a time for most of them, with not enough work even for their parents. The town council of Boone’s Gap had been trying, since Applby had mechanized the mine ten years ago, to get a garment factory in town; there were a couple of small shops where wives could augment their husbands’ welfare checks, but that was all. Despite government efforts to widen and improve roads, there still wasn’t much tourism, and the one motel in town didn’t boast the amenities apparently indispensable to folks from Philadelphia or Baltimore or Washington.

  A pity, she thought, looking out into the green stillness of yard and sunlight and berry canes. A thousand pities, that people couldn’t live in this magical beauty untroubled; that you had to weigh the sweetness of the morning and the rumpled velvet grandeur of the mountains towering over the town against the need to feed your family, the need to make a living, to make something of your life.

  A thousand pities that this beauty was the only thing you had to trade. And so many traded it for a life in the cities.

  She shook her head, her heart hurting for those sunny-hearted sixteen-year-olds who wouldn’t be in her classroom when school convened again in the fall. At times she had a sense of standing on a stream bank, watching the flashing water leap past her: a glimpse and it’s gone.

  She had made a choice long ago, and, in spite of the meager pay that she augmented with weaving and quilting, she told herself she was content. Nieces and nephews, students and cats. Sitting on the bank of the stream of time. She smiled at the morning, wondering what the day would bring.

  “Fred!” Bob Wishart reached out from the bed where he lay as his brother came into the room. “Fred, you came!”

  “I’m sorry.” Fred touched him, looked down into his face—round, fair-skinned and soft, a familiar, comforting mirror of his own—and then around at the big first-floor bedroom of their mother’s house. It was the only room large enough to contain the softly beeping battery of respirators, filters, monitors. The blue-flowered curtains were open, showing the fence cloaked in honeysuckle whose smell almost drowned the faint whiffs of antiseptic; the light dimmed the green watching eyes of the surge suppressors and backup batteries that clustered around the feet of the life-support equipment. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t come before, when this happened.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Bob’s smile, his joy, was like standing happily naked in summer sun. Bob had always been the twin to take life as it came. “You wrote the checks, anyway. God, what would Mom and I have done if you hadn’t come through? And you’re here now.”

  “I’m here now.” Fred settled himself by the bed in the old purple plush chair that had always graced the living room. Someone must have carried it in here for Mom to sit in.

  It was good to be back. Good to be home. Funny—when he’d left this place, fled to Stanford and the promise of more than the University of West Virginia could teach, it had felt like escaping prison. Even his love for Bob hadn’t outweighed the sense of suffocation, of being trapped in this small town and this dusty house; held prisoner by their mother’s nameless fears. He wished he could embrace his brother, but Bob lay tangled in the ghastly sterile spiderweb of tubes and monitors and stanchions bearing IV bags, as he had lain for ten weeks now since the accident. Thank God indeed for the money the Source Project paid, the money that had been ready when word reached him, to provide the care Bob needed without requiring their mother to stay at the hospital in Lexington to look after him.

  She wasn’t strong. She had relied on their father to deal with the world, and when he’d died, abandoning her as Fred had later abandoned her, she’d relied on her boys. Going away among strangers would have terrified her, killed her, maybe. Yet Fred knew she wouldn’t have abandoned her son.

  It was enough—almost—to embrace Bob in his mind, his thought. And Bob, looking up smiling from the pillow, returned the hug with his eyes and his heart.

  After the nightmare of the past few years, what had been stiflingly provincial now showed its true nature: safe and familiar, the heart of his self. In the peaceful sunlight of the bedroom the guilt he’d felt—the sense that he, Fred, should have been the one in the car when that truck roared around the corner in the dark—dissolved, like dirty grease in those time-lapse dish soap commercials they’d seen as children.

  He was the one who could help. Who’d save them both.

  Fred reached out with his mind, his heart, his thoughts, as if to draw the whole old house around him like a comforting blanket. The sounds and scents and the way the boards of the upstairs hall creaked, the cracked glass of the sun-porch window, the huge old Populux stove in the kitchen, everything. . . . Every memory of their childhood. The taste of every cookie they’d eaten in the cluttered ki
tchen and the smell of the attic dust.

  He could give it back to Bob. Come back to it himself.

  It was good to be home.

  Hank Culver put his head through the dispatcher’s office door. “Anything I need to know before we go down, Candy?”

  She checked the line of Post-it Notes stuck to the edges of her monitor—not that she needed to. Plump and curly-haired Candace Leary had been dispatcher at Applby Mining Corporation since long before they’d computerized, before there’d even been phones down into the mine. I’d have to stand at the top of the hole and shout, he’d once heard her telling Mr. Mullein’s secretary—Norman Mullein was son-in-law of the original old bastard whose name was on the mine. I thought it was heaven when they got us a couple tin cans on a string.

  The secretary had half-believed her. There wasn’t a tram that left the downcast or a malfunctioning sprinkler pipe she didn’t know about. “You’re still developing the main panels in Twelve?”

  He had been all week. “It’s still looking good. The seam’s about four feet thick and pretty level—maybe a little dip. Floor and ceiling look good.”

  “Good deal. The geology boys’ll be glad to hear it.” She checked the status board. “Everything clear. Hillocher’s crew is starting to retreat out of Area Ten.”

  “Good. Thanks.” As he clumped down the porch steps of the little office and crossed the dust-blackened gravel and mud that lay between it and the pithead, Hank checked his helmet light and his radio and touched the lumbar pack where he stowed the spare batteries—including an extra nick-cad for the radio, which weighed a ton. He’d paid for the extra battery himself, not trusting the one the company provided. In spite of all the union’s griping, the company tended to go cheap on equipment and keep it longer than they should. Back in the mid-sixties, when he’d started working at the old Green Mountain shaft on the other side of town, he’d gotten into the habit of buying as many spare parts as he could afford and carrying them in his lunchbox.