by Rodney Jones
“This is real.”
“Far as I know, it is.”
“1865? Wow!” She turned the coin over several times, still puzzling over it. “This is… what, a hundred and forty-something years old?”
“What? I believe you stuck a digit or two too many in there.”
Her eyes shifted from the coin in her hand to me and then back to the coin. “Where’d you get this, John?”
“My uncle gave it to me. I help him around the mill.” I reached into my pocket, pulled out the other coins, and handed them to Tess.
“He pays you in rare coins?”
“I don’t know that they’re so rare. I’ve never considered them that, anyhow.”
“1863, 1870… that’s before the Civil War. Jesus, John, these could be extremely rare.”
I was surprised at that. I’d never heard a gal cuss like she did, and besides that, she’d said “civil war,” which I thought was odd. Folks often talked about the war, but they’d call it just that, “The War.” I also knew for a fact that neither 1870 nor 1863 was before the war, but I wasn’t about to correct her.
“Well, if you like to believe those are rare, I’ll not argue about it. I was thinking a quarter dollar was a fair deal, though.”
“Oh… no, I can’t do that. No, these are yours.” She handed the coins back to me. “You should keep them, John. They were a gift from your uncle. They must be worth a lot.”
“A dollar, the way I figure.”
“Well, I think you should hold on to those.”
“If that’s how you feel.” I dropped the coins back into my pocket, then pointed up to the cables running from a tall wooden pole by the road to the gable end of the house. “You have a telegraph in your house?”
“Telegraph?” She shook her head. “One of those dot dash things? You mean a telephone? We have a phone. And cell phones, like everyone else.”
“A phone?”
She laughed. “You remind me of E.T.”
“Look,” I said, “I was just a wondering about the telegraph lines, is all. Well… and all the machines. Like the one that came from your house this morning. What was that? Red and all.”
“Machines? What are you talking about?” She threw up her hands. “Where exactly is this Greendale? Do they maybe have nurses and doctors there?”
“The machines… last night in Wallingford… dozens of them going up and down Rutland Road.”
“Did they maybe go rrrrrmm varoom beep beep?”
I shook my head. “Uh…”
“Cars? You mean the cars, John? My mom leaving for work this morning? Is that what you’re talking about?”
“Huh?”
“Cars.”
“The things with big black wheels?”
“Everyone I know calls them cars. Machines with big black wheels. You wonder why they don’t simply call them that.”
“Where’d they come from is what I’d like to know.”
“I’m curious about something. If I tell you where cars come from, are you going to remember, or tomorrow when you wake up, are you going to ask someone else?”
“You think I’m a half-wit?” I chuckled. “You don’t know when the war started, and you can’t add to ten, and you think I’m a half-wit?”
“I beg your pardon. Where do you get off telling me I can’t add?”
“The quarter dollar… seventy-five less sixty-five. I’m pretty dang sure that’d be ten. Not no hundred and forty.”
“Seventy-five? What? What are you talking about?”
“Seventy-five. The year.”
“Um…” She gave me a cockamamie look.
I’d known folk who would keep their children from attending school for various reasons, usually the fellows. “The current date—1875.” I tapped the palm of my hand as though the answer was there. “Less the date the coin was stamped, 1865. Seems to me, that’d be no more or less than ten.”
She snickered. “Last time I looked, it was 2009.”
I laughed. “Maybe you should look again.”
“Hmm…” She licked her index finger and stuck it up in the air. Her eyes shifted one way, then another. She shoved her hand down into her pocket and pulled out a small silver and black object. She opened it like a little book, and then held it toward me.
It blinked—the tiniest little green light—and had rows and columns of little shiny black bumps with numbers, symbols, and tiny letters on each. A small square glowed blue with more writing and symbols. I gaped at the thing.
“Okay, 2009 minus 1865 is what?” she said.
“What?”
“Nine minus five is four, borrow one from the twenty—”
“What is that?”
Tess gave me a puzzled look, which couldn’t have measured up to the one I was sure I wore on my own face. “What do you mean? What is what? You mean this?” She pointed to the thing in her hand. “The calendar? What?”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“See, the month is July, the day is the twenty-third, and the year is 2009. The date and the time. And it’s never wrong, kinda like me.”
“Can I see that?”
Tess placed the thing in my hand. It felt solid, like a good chunk of obsidian. I turned it over and saw a little square glass window with numbers printed behind it: 10:05. As I was staring at it, the numbers changed to 10:06, and, again, the tiny green light just above the window blinked. About every ten seconds, it blinked.
“The number changed.” I pointed to the little window.
“Yeah, it does that. Weird, huh? Every sixty seconds.”
“But how’s it do that?”
She gave me another of those long, studying stares. Her brow furrowed. Her jaw shifted left, then right. “You’ve never seen a cell phone?”
I pointed to the grid of little black buttons. “What are all these?”
“John, how can you not know about cell phones? They’re everywhere.”
“That’s the date? What is this 2009?”
“The year… duh.”
“Look, I’m not joking. Really, what is this?”
“Good God! It’s just a friggin’ cell phone. A telephone, you know. Call people. Hello. Hi. How are you? I’m fine. People call you. Alexander Graham Bell or whatever. Here. Give it back.”
I gave her a blank look. I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Can I have my phone back, please?”
I handed her the thing.
She was looking my way, mulling over something. “Give me one of your friends’ numbers.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, right.” She began fiddling with the thing, poking it with her finger, and then lifted it to the side of her head, her eyes on me.
“Hi, Jen. Hey, I have someone here I’d like you to meet. He wants to talk to you. Yeah, really. Just talk to him.” She paused. A smile came to her lips. “Anything. Just say, ‘Hi, John Bartley,’ ‘Bite me,’ or whatever. I don’t care. Here he is.”
She handed the thing back to me, folded my fingers around it, and pushed my hand up toward my head. “Like a phone. Hold it near your ear.” She twisted my hand around and pressed the thing to my ear. “Say, ‘Hi, Jen.’”
“Say what?”
“Is this John?” A tiny voice seemed to come from the thing.
I looked at Tess.
“Go ahead. Say ‘Hi, Jen.’”
There was no way I could’ve said anything.
“Hi… hello… John Bartley? What’s going on? Hello?”
I pulled the gadget away from my ear and stared at it. A faint hello emitted from it. I handed it back to Tess. “Are you doing that?”
Tess pressed it to her ear again. “I’ll call you later, okay? No, no, no. It’s fine. No. I’m sorry. I’ll explain later. Yeah. Okay. See ya. Bye.” She folded the thing shut and turned to me with her face scrunched up. “Are you for real?”
A low groan left my throat. “Something’s wrong.” I held up my hands and shook my head. “This…
whatever this is. 2009? No, it ain’t possible. I’d be a hundred and fifty years old, and I’m clearly not that. What… what the devil is going on?” I was hearing that steady rolling thunder in the distance again. I glanced toward the sky, nothing but blue.
“John, where exactly is Greendale? Is it some kind of mental hospital or something?” She gave me a hard look. “Is it?”
“You think I’m crazy?”
She just looked at me.
“Well, no, I ain’t… no. Greendale is over near Weston. You know where Weston is, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“But not Greendale?”
She shook her head.
“The main road out of Weston. About two miles north. Greendale Road. A couple miles up from there is Greendale. I thought everyone knew that. Just a little town is all. No lunatics.”
“So what makes you think it’s 1875?”
“Yesterday was, and the day before that. Makes perfect sense that today would be and tomorrow… until 1876 comes ’round. It ain’t going to be 2009 just because someone went and put the number on a queer little blinking thing.”
“A queer little…?” She shook her head. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” She got up and entered the house, leaving the door open behind her. I heard her call from inside, “You thirsty, John? Want another Coke? Water? Orange juice? Anything?”
I’d had oranges only one other time in my life, and it wasn’t in July. “Orange juice?”
“You want ice?”
chapter five
TESS APPEARED AT THE DOOR with a glass of juice in each hand. A leather pouch, dyed the color of a blue spruce, dangled from a long thin strap over her shoulder. She handed me a glass, then sat down alongside me. She lifted the flap at the side of the pouch, reached in, and pulled out a plump wallet that had a small compartment held shut by a clasp of tiny, interlocking metal teeth. Inside was an assortment of coins.
“Here, cup your hands,” she said.
I did, and she dumped the coins into them. I examined each, one at a time—a copper cent with Abe Lincoln pictured on the one side.
“What’s the date?” she asked.
I checked, didn’t say anything, then looked at the other coins. At first, the dates, those tiny numbers on the face of each coin, appeared as nothing more than that—just numbers, pulled from a hat—but then a prickly awareness began creeping through my mind. My stomach churned. The hairs on my forearms stood up on mountainous goose bumps. I could read the numbers well enough: 1996, 2001, 2007, 1989. My mind, however, refused to accept them. I handed the coins back to her, then lifted my glass of juice to my lips and gulped down half.
“You okay?” she asked.
I blinked. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
Did I misunderstand? I repeated the words in my mind: Are you okie? Okae? Tess, with all her nonsense, was not making things any easier. “What do you mean… am I okie?”
“What?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying half the time.”
“Seriously?”
“O’ course I’m serious! Okie? I mean, what is that?”
“I didn’t say okie. I said okay.”
I sighed and shook my head.
“Should I take that as your answer?” She kept a suspicious eye on me as I tipped the glass of juice back and downed the rest.
“I don’t know what an okay is, but I doubt that I am one.”
She shook her head. “Fine. Sorry. I didn’t mean to…” She hesitated then sighed. “All right. It means ‘all right.’ Are you all right?”
“Okay means all right? Since when?”
“Well, are you?”
Was I okay, all right, or was I something else? I couldn’t find an answer that suitably fit how I was, so I just said I was, but I was pretty sure she suspected otherwise. Either way, my response seemed to suffice. Neither of us said anything for a time.
I’d glance her way. She’d peer down toward the juice in her hand, then at me or somewhere else. I looked off toward the woods.
I had a sudden urge to get up and go, but wasn’t clear about where. Greendale? Rutland? In any case, I figured it was time to thank her and be on my way, and so I said, “Well—” at the exact same moment she said, “Well—”
We looked at each other.
She said, “You know it’s 2009.”
A sound came from my throat. It wasn’t anything, not a yes or a no. A croak? A burp? It wasn’t an answer; I knew that.
A smile flashed on Tess’s lips for just an instant.
“I reckon I should be goin’.”
Concern appeared in her eyes. “My mom won’t be home for another three hours. You’re welcome to take a shower here before you go… if you want. I could throw your clothes in the wash and find some sweats or something you could slip on in the meantime.”
It took me a moment to understand. “You just offered to wash my clothes?”
“Yeah.”
I shook my head.
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“Well, no, it’s mighty kind of you. But they really ain’t all that dirty.” Never mind that it was likely the craziest offer I’d ever received from a gal.
She cocked her head a little to one side. “I think you’d probably feel better… cleaner, anyway.”
“I don’t know as clean britches is going to improve my situation any.”
She sighed. “You stink.” She pinched her nose.
I lifted my arm and took a sniff. “I went for a swim a few days back. I smell that bad?”
“Bad would be sugar-coating it.” She got to her feet and opened the front door. “Come on.”
Mostly out of curiosity, I got up and followed her into the house. I didn’t get far, though, before being besieged by the corner-to-corner strangeness immediately beyond her door.
She turned back to me. “Come on.”
I looked at Tess. She was at home with those objects, the purpose of which I could not fathom. I looked at her, then again glanced about the interior of the home in which she lived. It wasn’t just the individual objects or the abundance of things that stopped me, but the colors, the materials, even the dimensions of the rooms, every corner, up and down. “What the…?”
“You all right, John?”
I took a step forward.
“This way.” She turned down a hall and stepped through a doorway to the left.
I heard a click, and the room lit up as bright as a sunny day. I was slowly getting used to the idea of being surprised, but was not yet ready for the magnitude of the surprises. “You did that?”
“Did what?”
I pointed from where I stood in the hall. “Made them lamps light.”
“For crying out loud, John. Yes, I flipped the light switch.”
“Say what?”
Click, click, click, click… The light went off, then on, then off and on again.
“Magic,” she said with an impatient look in her eye.
I stuck my head through the door. “My Lord, look at this! What is that?”
“Why, that’s the john, John. You sit there and—”
“A water closet?”
She looked at me, then back down to the glossy white fixture coming up from the floor. “A what?”
“My old schoolmarm once showed us a newspaper from New York that had an article about water closets in it.”
“Water closets? Really? That’s what they used to call them?”
I nodded, then studied the thing more closely. “You don’t ever have to empty it?”
“Nope, it all gets neatly flushed down that hole there, never to be seen again… hopefully. But check this out. You’re going to like this.”
She pulled back a long, sky-blue curtain to reveal a seamless, shiny white stall with strangely shaped silver objects protruding from up and down the side. Adopting an exaggerated drawl, she said, “Would I be correct in assuming you’re unfamiliar with how indoor plumb
ing works?”
I nodded.
“Well, it don’t matter none. Go on, git yer smelly butt in thar, an we’ll git ya all shined up like new.”
Was she mocking me? Yes, but I let it go; I had plenty of other things on my mind, such as that business with the bath. It didn’t strike me as right—me a complete stranger, and that pretty gal offering me a bath. I shook my head. “No, thank you very much.”
“You afraid of a little soap? Afraid I might peek?”
“It ain’t that.”
“Well, I’m not going to force you.”
“Taking a bath,” I said, “should be like washing your hands, only bigger. This though…” I pointed to the wall of shiny ornaments. “Does it shuck corn, too?” I held back a smile.
She snickered. “John, you’re really good at this. It’s almost spooky.”
“Good at what?”
Tess nodded. “Hmm… okay, okay. So this is how I think we should do it. I’ll show you how the plumbing works, then leave the room while you undress. You’ll climb in there, close the curtain, and holler. Then I’ll come back in with my biohazard suit and tongs, gather your clothes, and leave you something to wear while your clothes are being disinfected. And I’ll do my best not to peek. How about that?”
I figured I’d be stuck there for another hour, maybe two, but how bad could it be? “Should I go draw some water?”
Tess gave me a blank look, which then became a smile. “You could, but then, wouldn’t you be missing the whole point of indoor plumbing?”
Taking a shower, to my surprise, was very pleasant. A constant supply of clean water came from a spigot just over my head, while the dirty water disappeared down a hole at the bottom of the tub. Dozens of fine streams hit me at a pressure so high they nearly stung. But the most amazing thing was that the water could instantly be made hot or cold or anything in between simply by turning a knob.
The breeches she left me came a bit shy of my ankles, but were soft as goose down. My trousers and shirt were being washed in machines. Tess didn’t so much as get her hands wet.
While waiting for them to dry in yet another machine, we sat out on the platform I’d seen earlier that morning and sipped from glasses filled with Coke drink.
“Okay,” she said, “how about we play twenty-first century for a while?”