Written in Time

by Jerry Ahern

  Ellen, alone with Lizzie in the back of the buckboard, asked, “What sort of illness is it that Miss Diamond has?”

  “Don’t rightly know, ma’am, and that’s fo’ fact. Last time Doc Severinson was in Atlas—”

  “Doc Severinson?” Jack repeated, incredulous.

  “Y’all heard o’ the Doc?”

  “Forget it, Jack; it’ll only confuse things,” Ellen cautioned.

  Jack nodded silently as Tom Bledsoe went on. “Leastways, ol’ Doc tol’ Margaret she oughta get herself down t’ Carson City for a good looksee with the docs they got down there. But, Margaret, she don’t cotton much t’ leavin’ her students fo’ no week or two.”

  Ellen volunteered, “Maybe we can help, Lizzie and I.”

  “I’ll tell Margaret, then, if’n y’all like.”

  “Sure,” Lizzie volunteered.

  Each “survival kit,” aside from things like aspirin, acetaminophen tablets, antiseptic cream, bandages, water-purification tablets and a good knife, contained a small gold bar. Ellen, Elizabeth and David each had such a kit. Within the attaché case were the diamonds and three additional gold bars. Converting one of these to current United States money at the general store—which, somehow or another, Jack Naile realized that they would come to own—provided them with enough cash for their immediate needs and then some.

  A “suite” of rooms at Mrs. Treacher’s rented for the princely sum of twenty dollars a month, including clean linens, breakfast and dinner, which was called “supper.” Mrs. Treacher was, at one time in an apparently quite distant past, British. She was a well-spoken woman, but her speech was very plain, and her usage was peculiarly stilted. As a guess, Jack Naile assumed that she might have spent her younger years “in service” to some household in England or in the eastern United States, following a husband west. She wore a simple silver wedding band, but there had been no mention of a Mr. Treacher. Short, plump, rosy-cheeked, she reminded Jack Naile of some movie version of a “typical” Swiss or German hausfrau.

  With accommodations arranged for the immediate future, there were other pressing concerns, funds or the lack thereof fortunately not among them. The ample gold supply that the Naile family had brought with them into the past would carry them through, as David gauged it, for more than a year, providing sufficient opportunity to eventually bring the diamonds to San Francisco and convert these into serious money.

  No one thought to be hungry, and by afternoon Ellen and Elizabeth were back at the general store acquiring clothing and other necessities.

  There was little in the way of ready-to-wear, most women apparently making their own clothing or engaging the services of the town’s solitary dressmaker.

  Jack and David fared little better, finding themselves faced with two alternatives: poorly cut, boxy-styled vested woolen suits or heavy, canvaslike work clothes. “It’s a cinch Roy Rogers never would have shopped here,” Jack remarked to his son. They were trying to determine if any of the suits would be close enough in size to be a decent fit.

  “I’m not going to wear shit like this for the rest of my life,” David announced.

  “I know you’ve never thought a great deal of my sense of sartorial resplendence, but we can’t start the first Nevada nudist colony, so pick some threads that’ll make do for the time being. We can get down to Carson City after a while and find something better. We can order out of a catalogue, maybe. Anyway, once we own this place, we can stock it with clothes we’ll all like—or at least tolerate.”

  David groaned, taking the most expensive suit of the few available. It was twelve dollars.

  The Naile family’s “suite” consisted of two bedrooms— surprisingly clean—and a small sitting room. The outhouse was behind the boarding house, of course, but there were chamber pots (“Who gets to clean these?” Lizzie asked the moment Mrs. Treacher had left them). There was a room at the end of the second-floor hallway with a large bathtub. Lizzie was given first dibs on the tub, but said she wouldn’t use it unless her mother sat outside the door. Ellen agreed, but insisted on Lizzie doing the same for her.

  Jack bathed last. It was safe to wear his Rolex on his wrist since no one could see him, and he smudged soapy water from its face to read the time. He’d reset the watch to local time shortly after they’d reached Atlas, and the luminous black face read nearly nine in the evening. All his life, Jack Naile had hated baths, seeing the concept of sitting in a bathtub as nothing more than simmering in one’s own dirt; but there was no such thing as a shower to be had in Atlas, all the more reason to move forward on acquiring the property where they would have their house built. Even without the amenities packed within the Suburban, a shower could be rigged, a good one.

  After a bland dinner at Mrs. Treacher’s table, and conversation generally even more bland with a corset salesman, the traveling dentist (who had commended them on the apparently fine condition of their teeth) and a gun salesman, Jack had taken David with him and gone off to arrange a carriage for the following morning.

  Upon their return to Mrs. Treacher’s, the gun salesman had been seated on the boarding-house front porch smoking a cigar. His name was Ben or Bob something, and he was a tall man for the period, about five nine or ten, and wore a plain gray three-piece suit. His hair was blond and straight, slicked back over a high forehead that seemed to be gaining ground in a battle against his hairline. Jack judged the man’s age at close to forty, but he seemed quite fit and trim. After a moment, David went inside and Jack lit a cigarette. “You’re from back East, though I can’t say I’ve seen prerolled cigarettes.”

  “They’re much more convenient this way,” Jack told him, his voice a little shaky sounding to him. He’d almost used the disposable Bic lighter from his pocket to fire the cigarette but had remembered at the very last second to strike a match against the porch rail instead. “So, what’s a Colt Single Action Army revolver sell for these days?”

  “I can get you a nice blued one for eighteen dollars. Nickel—but it will last longer—costs two dollars more. You’ll see ‘em higher, but not lower. That’s sure a nice lookin’ one on your hip.”

  Jack didn’t offer to show it to the man, lest he notice that the gun hadn’t been made yet and wouldn’t be until 1971.

  “Didn’t figure you’d show me your gun, Mr. Naile.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Me, as a salesman, I’m good with names. Bob Cranston’s the name, and guns are my game.” He laughed as he pulled a business card—one of the old, square kind, larger than its late-twentieth-century counterpart—from his vest pocket.

  Jack took the card. “Thanks.”

  “I’ve never seen a man with a gun like that who didn’t use it for making his living. You don’t strike me as one of Fowler’s range detectives, so that means you must’ve been a lawdog somewhere, back the other side of the Mississippi, maybe. Bein’ a salesman, I got a good ear for the way people talk. Only two places from around here you and your wife and family could be from, and that’s San Francisco or Denver, but I’d say Chicago’s more like it. Policeman back there?”

  “We’re from Chicago originally, but we lived in Georgia for a while. And, no. I’ve never been a policeman. You’ll have to excuse me. It’s been good talking with you.”

  Jack had left the porch. He found that David was using the bath. Twenty minutes later, with water that was more cool than hot, it had been Jack’s turn. He’d washed his hair first, and then bathed.

  Jack checked the Rolex again; he’d have to find some way in which to wear his watch without attracting attention. He stood up, slowly dousing himself head to foot with the last pitcher of fresh water.

  Definitely. Build a house, take a shower.

  Mounted on a rented bay mare, Jack rode in comparative silence beside the carriage, which only sat three people. David sat on the far right side of its solitary seat, near the brake and the rifle, his hands holding the reins. Lizzie sat on the opposite side, Ellen in the middle.

  �
�This is more comfortable than that buckboard thing Mr. Bledsoe drives,” Lizzie declared with an air of finality.

  As best Jack Naile could recall the terrain, and judging from the map and his modern lensatic-compass bearings, they were nearing the site of what would be/had been their home here.

  On the way out of town, as they passed the larger of Atlas’ two saloons, he had spotted what he assumed were some of Jess Fowler’s range detectives. A quick glance exchanged with his wife had confirmed that she had pegged the men as Fowler’s minions also. Jack was, of course, armed, as was David, David having donned the old Hollywood rig so that the holster was on his left side, the gun butt forward, the cartridge loops across his abdomen. However David carried a gun, Jack sincerely did not want his son to have to use one against another human being, and especially against someone who was evidently quite skilled at killing as a trade.

  The stream’s water sparkled clean and cold and ran fast, just as it had/would in the future (only almost certainly cleaner).

  “Hey, guys,” Jack Naile suggested. “How about you ladies taking a dip in the stream? Closest thing we’ll have to taking a shower until we get one rigged up.”

  “It’s going to be cold, Jack.” Ellen scrunched her nose, but eventually agreed. While the ladies took a quick dip, Jack and David watered the horses downstream and out of visual range. Sooner than Jack would have expected, Ellen found them, her hair dripping wet and the skirt of her “storebought” green dress clinging to her legs. “I never would have done that if I’d thought about not having towels, Jack. Watch the rocks. They’re slippery. But even though it was a little cool, it feels so good to be clean.”

  Jack Naile looked over at his son, “Just like the YMCA pool in Athens, huh? Come on!”

  Once they hit the water, Ellen’s description of the water temperature proved woefully inadequate. “This is freezing!” Jack shouted as he stepped into the stream.

  “Yeah! Isn’t it though!? Didn’t you wonder why my lips had turned blue, Jack?” Ellen called back from the other side of the carriage, where she and Lizzie stood out of sight.

  “Lips are not what’s turned blue on me!”

  “You shouldn’t talk that way in front of your daughter, Jack! You and David have fun. If you’re good, maybe we won’t hide your clothes.”

  Five minutes by the face of the Rolex was all that Jack could take, and David was out of the water in three minutes flat. David was rubbing his naked arms and legs to shed excess water, glaring as Jack emerged from the stream. “This was a dumb idea, Dad.”

  “We’ll get used to it, son!” But Jack hoped they wouldn’t have to get used to it for long. On the return trip to Atlas, Ellen and Lizzie sat huddled in their shawls, their bodies still shaking a little. Maybe David had been right, Jack Naile mused. It had been a dumb idea.

  It was very nearly dusk as Jack was handed back his deposit on the buggy and the horse and saddle. He’d dropped his family in front of the store that would, if this round of history proved out, someday be theirs. Rather progressively, considering that the time was after five, the store had still been open. David had taken the rifle with him, Jack keeping charge of the all-important attaché case that contained the family fortune.

  Jack lit a cigarette, his second of the day, remembering to use a match rather than the Bic. He was down to one pack remaining and, after that, it would be learning to roll his own, smoking cigars or quitting.

  He felt lighthearted, more so than at any time since their abrupt and potentially deadly arrival in the past. The property where the house would be built looked even better than it had/would. If they could rig it up and find something to use for wiring, the stream would provide more than enough hydroelectric-power potential. And despite the water temperature, the dip in the stream had been fun. Had the children been elsewhere, it would have been more fun, with Ellen’s body up against his in the water and wanting his body’s warmth once out of the stream. Yet those times would come. All too soon, he realized with each day that passed, the kids would be grown, on their own, he and Ellen alone with memories of a past that was a future that had not happened yet, but somehow had.

  As Jack approached the boarding house from the opposite side of the street, he wondered absently if Ellen, Lizzie and David had already gone up on the little porch and continued inside.

  The corset salesman, looking weary beyond endurance, sat in the solitary rocking chair. Jack couldn’t remember his name. “Let me guess. The axle for your wagon still isn’t fixed.”

  “You’re right there, fella.” The corset salesman shifted his bulk—he was pushing three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce—simultaneously with shifting the stump of a cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right side. “I needa be on my way soon. Got customers to see.”

  “Corsets a big business?”

  “Big. Future’s in corsets.” Jack laughed silently at that. “Someday every woman in this here great land o’ ours gonna be wearin’ one o’ my corsets. See, I don’t just sell ’em, neighbor. My brother-in-law and me, we own the factory back in Chicago what makes ‘em. I cover the West and he covers the East.”

  “Sounds like he’s got the easier job, friend.”

  “Future’s in the West, neighbor. And your average woman, well, she wants to have what other women have, and that’s a corset. If’n you’ll pardon the word, ‘virgin’ territory. That’s what the West is for corsets. Virgin territory.”

  Jack Naile shrugged his shoulders. “Where I come from, most of the women who wear corsets aren’t exactly virgins. Say, you see my wife and son and daughter come in?”

  “That wife o’ yours—and I mean no disrespect—but her and your daughter, you might wanna get ‘em some of the Night Thrush corsets. They’re top o’ the line. Top!”

  “My girls aren’t the corset type, friend; but, I’ll ask them. So, they went inside?” Jack pressed.

  “Ain’t seen ‘em, neighbor, and I been on this here porch since . . .” He tugged a big gold pocket watch from the confines of his nearly bursting vest. “Since half-past four.”

  Jack licked his lips, simultaneously snapping away the butt of his cigarette and thumbing the hammer loop off his revolver holster.

  “Thanks, friend!” Jack shouted, grabbing up the attaché case as he broke into a dead run through the gathering darkness, toward the store, his right hand on the butt of his gun lest it pop out of the holster.

  Jack heard indistinguishable voices from the narrow breezeway to the side of the store. The store’s lights were still on. He passed the store at a dead run, glancing through the near window, the double doors and the far window as he ran. The aproned, balding proprietor was sweeping up, no sign of customers.

  The sounds coming from the breezeway were definitely voices, male and female.

  Jack stopped, his hand still on the butt of his Colt, his palms sweating.

  “Lookee heah, gals. Don’t matter no mind to me an’ Lester whether you hitch up them there skirts y’selves or we go an’ do it fer ya. Less’n ya like gettin’ on ya knees and doin’ us that way. And don’t go lookin’ to the boy. If’n he wakes up, it won’t be for a long time, and that’s fo’ fact.”

  “Go to hell, you son of a bitch.”

  It was Ellen’s voice, and Jack, stepping into the mouth of the breezeway, announced, “And I can send both you assholes to hell real quick.”

  The only light in the breezeway came in broad pale-yellow shafts emanating from gaps in the curtained windows above. The general store had a false front, but the building beside it had a true second floor, the rooms there serving as a cheap rooming house for cowboys and drifters.

  Ellen and Lizzie, all but lost in shadow, but obviously scared, stood shoulder to shoulder, their backs against the side wall of the Merchants Café. The men bracing them, on the general-store side of the breezeway, were more readily visible in the weak light from the café’s second-story windows.

  David lay sprawled on the ground, mostly in shado
w, and Jack couldn’t tell his condition.

  “Lester” and the man who’d declared his foul intentions wheeled around to face Jack. They had the look of Fowler’s range detectives about them, broad-brimmed slouched hats, leather stovepipe chaps, each of the men with a six-gun at his right hip and a second one butt forward at his left. Jack noticed one of them had a third revolver, probably David’s.

  “They mess with you or Lizzie, Ellen?”

  “They don’t have the balls, Jack. One of them—that piece of shit, Lester—” Ellen stabbed an accusatory right index finger toward the man with David’s revolver in his belt—“he slugged David from behind while David was beating the crap out of the other one.”

  Jack Naile wanted a cigarette very badly. “If you harmed my son, guys, you’re in deep shit.”

  “Back y’all’s play an’ fill y’all’s hand!” Lester of the three revolvers shouted, the gun at Lester’s right hip springing from his holster as if levitated by David Copperfield.

  Jack felt his body moving, his right leg snapping out and forward, his right shoulder dropping as his right knee slightly bent and the fingers of his right hand closed around the butt of his Colt. Something whistled past Jack’s right ear—probably a bullet.

  The sound of the Colt firing from the hand at the end of Jack’s extended right arm shocked him into awareness of what he’d been doing only by reflex action. The single shot from Jack’s Colt struck Lester somewhere between the dark wild rag over Lester’s Adam’s apple and the belt buckle above Lester’s chaps. Lester fell back against the wall of the general store.

  The unnamed man, who had threatened Jack’s wife and daughter with rape, had a six gun in his right hand and was grabbing for Lizzie with his left. Ellen punched him in the face. He let go of Lizzie and seemed perplexed for a split second, stepping more fully into one of the shafts of yellow light. Hit the woman or shoot the man?

  Jack didn’t wait for the range detective’s decision, triggering a second shot. The man’s right eye and cheekbone seemed to collapse, as if sucked into his face, his pistol discharging into the ground near his boots. His body sprawled back along the wall of the general store.