by Jerry Ahern
“You’re not thinking that somehow we’d be able to take the Suburban back in time with us?”
“I can’t say for sure, but if we all get sucked back in time together and we all stay with the Suburban, there’s a chance, right? We take out the rear seat and leave it. I take the Suburban over to the Chevy dealer and get them to put a roof rack on it and add an auxiliary gas tank. We get four additional tires—”
“Those ones from Sam’s Club have held up real well.”
“Right. Get four new wheels—we wouldn’t be able to remount tires. If you did the research and got Lizzie to help you, we could get everything we needed to know on microfiche. Hell, we could probably get Encyclopedia Britannica that way. Medical and dental info, and the stuff we’d need for basic field surgery, dental care, like that. Learn how to fabricate nutritional supplements. You’ve always had a green thumb.”
“There are lots of books we could get, and probably on microfiche—”
“Or get them put on microfiche, which could be kind of expensive, but worth it.”
“And what are you going to be doing?” Ellen asked her husband. “Learning how to brand steers and—”
“No, I’m serious. I’ll find out what we’d need so that we could keep some semblance of twentieth-century civilization going, even though we were a century in the past. Evidently, the Naile family lived there for quite some time, which means they built or bought a house, probably had one built. We could have one room that we could electrify if we brought the wire and the switches and the circuit-breaker box.”
“How will we get electricity?” Ellen said.
“We build near a stream or river, set up a sophisticated waterwheel, or windmills—solar would be too cumbersome. We couldn’t pack enough stuff to make it work. So, Lizzie could still listen to CDs, we could still have an electric clock—”
“A microwave—no, we wouldn’t need it. But a hair dryer.”
“A toaster!” Jack supplied.
“When was the last time we used a toaster? And electric can openers never work. But a small, conventional electric oven and a flat four-burner electric stove.”
“There you go!” Jack enthused. “Stuff that would make life more livable. We could have electric lights. If we did the research, we could figure out a way to step down the voltage so that we could use the bulbs that Edison had already invented by then, and we could have a couple of fluorescent fixtures and replacement tubes and starters and everything so that we could have really serious light occasionally. Hell, with the right research and the money to get the work done, we could have somebody build us new fluorescent tubes in a couple of years. We could build another house and have the whole interior just like a modern place and nobody’d be the wiser. And running water? Hey, the Romans had running water. All we need is some PVC and gravity and—”
“I get the idea, Jack. That’s all going to fit into the Suburban?”
“Yeah. I don’t see why not. If we pack carefully. It’s not like we’re going to need a lot of clothes, because modern clothes would be a dead giveaway.”
Ellen leaned back in her chair. “Nothing I’m going to like better than wearing twenty pounds of ankle length clothing everyday. Want a cup of coffee?”
“Sure.”
Ellen stood up and went to the stove, pausing as she turned on one of the electric range’s burners. “You really think we could do that? Keep a modern life, kind of?”
“What? The electricity and plumbing and stuff? Yeah, if the Suburban comes back with us. And the microfiche—we’d need two readers and a really ample supply of batteries, and we never let the case with that stuff out of our sight. We sleep with it, so even if we didn’t get the Suburban back, we’d be able to reconstruct most of the stuff we’d need from things available a hundred years ago. It’s just all in knowing how.”
“What about your gun collection? The guns and the ammo will take up a lot of room.”
“I’ve already been thinking about that,” he told her.
Ellen had assumed as much. “I bring everything I’ve got in .45 Colt. There’s going to be plenty of .45 Long Colt ammo available a century ago. I’d need a serious rifle. Maybe an 1895 Marlin in .45-70 and get a Vernier tang sight installed. A couple of knives made with modern steel. Everything else we can get when we get there. We sell the rest as quickly as we can and the money from the guns and stuff goes toward the electrical and plumbing stuff and the microfiche and shit like that. What do you think?” Jack picked up a cigarette, but set it down, unlit . . .
The cheapest way to get to the small town in Nevada devolved to flying via Las Vegas and over to Reno. Clarence, despite more than six years in the Air Force, hated flying and made no secret of it. Jack rented a car in Reno; Clarence talked all the way as they drove. “Ellen was really worried.”
“Not after I reminded her that all four of us were in that one photograph and the Nailes arrived as a family of four. So, some of us aren’t going to get time-zapped and the others left behind. We’ll be fine. Relax, Clarence.” Jack Naile’s main problem was that he was too relaxed, about to fall asleep, the terrain different from Georgia’s insistent greenery, but just as repetitive. He’d had the window open earlier, but Clarence didn’t like open windows in cars, so Jack had closed it. But Jack started cranking the window down again. “I’ve gotta open a window, Clarence, or I’m gonna fall asleep.”
“Why don’t you turn on the air-conditioning? Or let me drive.”
“It’s cold with the air-conditioning. Fresh air is good for you, Clarence, keeps the lungs in shape. We’ve been breathing canned air on two airplanes. Time for some fresh.” Clarence might bitch about it some more, but Jack Naile really didn’t care and kept the window down about two inches.
“That photo with only you and the kids scares the crap out of me, Jack.”
Jack Naile lit a cigarette. “I go with the theory that Ellen took the photograph. The composition is good. It looks like her work, with a modern camera. So that’s why Ellen wasn’t in the photograph.”
“This is a pile of bullshit, right, Jack? I mean, there’s gotta be some damned logical explanation for it.”
“You think of one, let me know, Clarence.” The two lane road was well maintained, but seemed to go on forever, the terrain surrounding them a cross between high desert and low rolling hills, as inviting as lunar landscape.
“You really see yourself and Ellen and the kids living here? David would never make it!” Clarence declared.
“Why would David never make it? He’s ridiculously physically fit, smart—”
“Think about it, Jack! For God’s sake, David has to have the newest and the best of everything,” Clarence continued, chuckling. “And he doesn’t even like going to a rodeo! You really think he’s going to ride a horse? No way.”
“Well, I tell you, Clarence. He’ll either ride a horse, drive a wagon or walk until automobiles get out this way. You remind me of Cleopatra.”
“What? Are you nuts?”
“That’s beside the point, son. You remind me of Cleopatra after her barge sunk in the river—you’re in de Nile.”
“Yeah, you just go ahead and laugh! But you’re buying into a load of shit,” Clarence growled. Jack had long ago decided he’d fight the man who criticized Clarence for having a short temper, but that wouldn’t mean that Jack wouldn’t agree with the guy. “This is just fuckin’ trick photography and some elaborate scheme of some fuckin’ nutball, and you’re buying into it. Time travel doesn’t happen, Jack. We both know that.”
“Looks like it’s about to,” Jack informed his nephew. “See, I don’t particularly care to wind up in the Old West of a hundred years ago, either. Think about it, Clarence. If this movie actually gets made, it’ll open the door for a lot of our other stuff to get made into movies, maybe. And just maybe we’ll make enough money we can relax a little, do some good things for the kids, for you. Remember how Ellen and I’ve always said that the day we got a really big check in wou
ld be the day we had a nuclear war or a meteor struck the planet or something? Much as I wish it weren’t, this time-travel thing looks like it’s not only a meteor, but a fucking nuclear meteor, and aimed right at us. And there’s not a damned thing I can do about it except try to make the best of it. We’re going to miss you, Clarence, and you’re going to miss us, but I can’t change it,” Jack concluded.
“Bullshit, Jack! Fuckin’ bullshit!”
“You want me to turn around, and you can fly back to Atlanta?”
“Fuck you—no, dammit!”
“Then relax, okay? You’ll live longer. We don’t want to leave you in the present while we go into the past, but, if this happens, it doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of choice.” There was a green-and-white information sign coming up on the right. “See what that sign says, Clarence.”
Jack already knew what it said—“Moment of truth upon you in four miles.” His hands sweated on the steering wheel, and the pit of his stomach felt like somebody had just turned on a blender.
Practically the first words out of Arthur Beach’s mouth had been, “My God, you look just like the Jack Naile in those old photographs!” Because of this, Jack realized, Clarence had taken an instant dislike to Arthur Beach.
Atlas, Nevada, looked nothing like it had in the photograph that started the whole thing, Jack Naile mused. It looked modern, normal. There was a strong breeze blowing in from the desert, gradually intensifying; the occasional dust devil was the only thing that made the blacktopped street look like something out of a Western town.
“That’s where Jack Naile’s store once stood, Mr. Naile,” Arthur Beach announced, pointing a well-manicured finger across that street.
“Remember, Arthur? Call me Jack. Mr. Naile’s what they call my son.”
“Right.”
“That law office?” Clarence asked.
“Only the foundation is original, Mr. Jones. The building-commission people and the historical-society people were almost one and the same, husbands on the building commission and wives on the historical society. So when downtown was redeveloped, the wives got the husbands to save as much as they could, which is why this street looks like it’s part of another town or something by comparison to the rest of downtown.”
The “rest of downtown” wasn’t all that much, really.
The old main street, where they stood, ran a distance of a long city block. The old foundations and some old facades, many of the buildings vacant, lined both sides of the street. At three of the four corners were short blocks which, Arthur Beach had told them, were part of the downtown-development project. The fourth corner was nothing more than where the highway did a right angle and went on past Atlas, across higher desert and toward the nearby mountains. A convenience store, an ordinary gas station that offered mechanical work and a diner that advertised it had slot machines and also sold ammunition were the only businesses there.
The old main street—which was called Old Main Street—was admirably wide. At eleven in the morning on Sunday, there was no traffic at all. Jack Naile stepped off the curb and started across the street.
The sun wasn’t quite overhead yet and its angle allowed Jack to see his own reflection in the plate glass window of the law office. The wind coming in off the desert blew his longish, still mostly brown hair across his forehead. He noted that the corners of his mouth were downturned under his salt-and-pepper mustache. Was he as wary as he looked, he wondered absently, or was this just a face he turned toward Clarence—who had been pissing him off— and Arthur Beach, who was so cooperative that it made him wonder if Beach had some ulterior motive?
Jack stepped up onto the far side curb and stood in front of the window. He stood just a little less than six feet, and his shoulders looked broad within the A-2 bomber jacket. Since he’d stopped drinking beer and started drinking white wine, his waist was back down to a thirty-four, with not too much of a droop at the belly. Not bad for mid-forties, he reassured himself.
Jack thrust his hands into his pockets, his eyes glancing at the foundation below the plate-glass window. What did he feel? Did he know those bricks? Or would he? What he felt, really, was that he wished Ellen were with him, standing beside him. And he felt naked—because he’d flown, he’d left the Seecamp .32 in the gradually self-destructing glove compartment of Clarence’s Honda. Jack Naile was so used to the feel of the little gun in his right pants pocket that its absence was something of which he was keenly, continually aware.
He looked back into the plate-glass window. Clarence, a big guy but looking that much bigger beside the slightly built Arthur Beach, was crossing the street. Jack lit a cigarette.
“Do you want to see the ranch? I mean, what’s left of it, Jack?” Arthur Beach called out.
“Yeah, let’s see the ranch.”
As he’d lit the cigarette, Jack Naile had noticed the bronze plaque set into the foundation, assumedly by the local historical society. It read Jack Naile—General Merchandise. He noticed that his hands were trembling and thrust them into his pockets.
Clarence refused to enter the ruin of the house and stayed by the car. Jack stood within what had obviously once been a quite large home. Whether the structure had been claimed by fire—his own faulty electrical work?—or wind, there was no way to tell upon casual inspection. All that remained was a meticulously fitted stone-and-mortar chimney, most of the mortar gone, the chimney jutting defiantly upward from an extraordinarily large hearth of the same construction.
The land on which the house was built was almost a terrace, as level as if graded by modern equipment. The lot was separated from a stream by the distance of what would have been the width of an ordinary backyard, its far edge abutting the sloping bank. Fast moving, ideal for hydro-electric power, the stream’s waters emerged from deep within a forest of pines, its boundary perhaps a hundred yards distant. A double rank of the trees broke away from the woods, arced downward and across the opposite boundary of the level terrace and onward, nearly intersecting the single-lane wide dirt track that had led them up toward the house from the highway. The highway was eight or ten miles back, perhaps two hundred feet lower in elevation.
The drive from the highway had been less boring than the last leg of the drive from Reno to Atlas, the terrain rolling up through foothills and into the mountains, mountains that would have been visible from a porch here, had one still stood.
“Who owns this property now?” Jack heard Clarence asking Arthur Beach.
Beach answered, “I don’t know. I’m still trying to find out. Some corporation, it looks like.”
“Find out, Arthur,” Jack Naile called back over his shoulder without turning around. “I’d really appreciate it.”
On the drive from Atlas to what had been the Naile ranch, Arthur Beach had asked about the book that Jack had told Beach was being written. Jack had given truthful answers about the progress of their research and the general plotline, never mentioning that with each detail that was uncovered, it seemed more and more frighteningly obvious that at issue was not a book, but an inescapable trip through time.
“You know, if you and your nephew would like, I can arrange for you to get some help if you want to go to Carson City, to the State Historical Society. It’s not too far below Reno. Do you have the time?”
Jack Naile looked at Arthur Beach, then at Clarence. “What do you think, Clarence?”
“You let me drive, we’ll get there with time to spare.”
Clarence was an excellent driver, but Jack Naile didn’t like being driven by someone who seemed frequently inclined to exceed speed limits, as Clarence had exhorted him to do while they’d crossed the desolate expanse that was the final leg of their trip to Atlas. When necessary, Jack could speed with the best of them, but never otherwise. He’d developed that habit—trying to attract as little attention as possible to his driving—when he and Ellen had lived in the metropolitan Chicago area and carrying a gun was seriously illegal.
Jack started walk
ing toward Arthur Beach’s white Jeep Cherokee, resigned to the fact that Clarence, who wore a thirty-six leg length, would get the front passenger seat again. “Let’s see what time it is when we get back to town. And then I might get you to make that call, Arthur. I can’t thank you enough already.” Getting into the Jeep’s backseat was bad enough, but getting out of it made him feel like a cork getting tugged out of a wine bottle.
***
“The reason we learned nothing new in Atlas was because there was nothing new to learn—it’s a pile of crap.” Variations on that theme had liberally laced Clarence’s end of the conversation for the entire length of the trip back to and past Reno, toward Carson City. There had also been several remarks about Arthur Beach being “in” on whatever “it” was. Their overnight motel reservations—they would be flying back to Atlanta the following morning—were in Reno, and, after the visit to the State Historical Society, they would be retracing part of their route.
Finding the State Historical Society using Arthur Beach’s directions was effortless in the light Sunday traffic, though finding a space in which to park the rented Ford proved somewhat challenging. Once inside, however, the first person they approached turned out to be the woman Arthur Beach had phoned and asked to assist them. Mrs. Hattie Lincoln, mid-sixties and a little plump, with a pinkish face and cheeks that indicated high blood pressure, heavy alcohol intake or too much blush, had already assembled mounds of materials for their review.
Jack told Clarence what to look for, and they split the work, Mrs. Lincoln popping in on them several times in the office she’d let them use. If Ellen had been with them, the research would have been smoother and more productive, Ellen being the best and most meticulous researcher Jack Naile had ever encountered. Yet even without her, with time running out before the facility closed for the day, Jack unearthed several documents, which Mrs. Lincoln cheerfully copied for them.