Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “Yes, I can hear the academic discussion going on,” Sandra said. “Becky’s gone to bed. I’m not going to get her up. She’s been feeling down and she needs her rest. Goodbye.” And she hung up.

  She’s been feeling down . . .

  She’d talked about suicide more than once. Becky was a pale woman with curly black hair, full lips, a face that showed the angularity, a hint of the Native American planes of many from the Southwest—she’d grown up in Arizona. She had a wistful smile, an air of nonchalant resignation. She wore long dark old-fashioned dresses, and black-spangled old lady’s feathered hats she found in second-hand stores.

  I first found Becky in Bisbee, where her mother owned a souvenir shop for tourists hunting remnants of the Old West. She sat behind the counter, using the same resigned expression for attending to a customer as just staring out the dusty, fly-blown window. A small record player set up behind the cash register was playing “Oh! Sweet Nothin’ ” by the Velvet Underground, not very loud. It was only later that I learned the name of the song.

  “Afternoon,” I said. “You’re Miss Rebecca Clanton?”

  She nodded. “You’re that guy from the university?”

  “College. North San Diego College of the Humanities.”

  “I got your postcard. Researching a book on the Clanton gang, you said?” She shook her head apologetically. “I don’t know anything about my ancestors. I meant to write you back about that. Sorry you made the trip to glorious Bisbee, if you came to talk to me.”

  She gave out with that wistful smile. Immediately, I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her. And kiss those large soft lips.

  “Lots of times, people know more about their family than they realize. Or they remember that an aunt has some old letters or . . . Could I take you to dinner and just see if anything comes to mind?”

  She looked at me doubtfully. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “It’s Bill Washoe.”

  “ ‘Lonesome Cowboy Bill.’ ” She smiled. Sort of smiled. It was only later, too, that I found out that “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” was a song from the same Velvet Underground album. “Okay, Lonesome. Let’s go, as soon as I ring this lady up . . .”

  I was right, there was Clanton history to be gleaned from Becky. Turned out that her great-grandmother had been shacked up with Billy Clanton— the same Billy Clanton, cowboy and sometime rustler, who’d been shot to death, along with Frank and Tom McClaury, by the Earps and Doc Holliday in a small vacant lot near the OK Corral on October 26, 1881. Ike Clanton’s younger brother, Old Man Clanton’s youngest kid, Billy had fallen for a mixed-race dance hall girl named Isabella Chavez, a girl whom some called “Issy” or “Easy”; she was said to be a quarter French, a quarter black, a quarter Indian, a quarter Chinese—but no one knew for sure. Billy had gotten Issy knocked up, and had promised he’d marry her, but hadn’t made good on it, and it was said that just before the gunfight Ike had been trying to talk him out of the marriage. Then they’d gotten on the wrong side of the Earp brothers, in Tombstone, and Billy’d been shot down. Isabella had her child, and had given the boy, William Jose, Billy Clanton’s surname; the local registrar, some said in exchange for a sexual favor, had stretched a point and made the name official, though she’d never been married to Billy Clanton. That much I’d known. Consulting County records, I also learned that William Jose Clanton, the semiofficial Billy Clanton Jr., had married one Dolores Plainville, who’d borne a boy, James Isaac Clanton, who’d married Rebecca’s mother Louella. Rebecca revealed that William Clanton the Second had deserted Dolores early on, and “Jimmy Ike,” as Becky’s dad had been called, had deserted Becky and her Mom when she was three.

  “We don’t have any papers going all the way back to Billy,” said Becky, over a steak salad, which was the only kind of salad they had in that Bisbee restaurant. The Happy Widow, the restaurant was called. She picked at the lettuce around the beef, leaving the meat alone on her plate when she’d done. “So a lot of these gunfighter history guys, they don’t take my family name too seriously. Mom tried to get them interested, so we could sell some stuff. She got an old pistol and said it was Billy’s. She actually bought it in a pawn shop.”

  “You think your mom would talk to me?”

  “If you can get her out of the bars long enough. And offer her money. But she’ll just make stuff up. I’m pretty sure the Clanton thing is real, though. I look at a picture of him, of Billy Clanton, and he looks like us. And . . . he was shot down. That’s almost like saying he was in my family. We’re all shot down one way or another. Not always by guns. He was shot down young. My granddad ran off to avoid the draft—and maybe to get away from the family—and he was killed when they tried to arrest him. And my dad, we haven’t heard from him since he left, but I heard he’s in prison over in Texas. They just run off and get shot or put in jail somewhere.”

  “Do they? You’ve had some bad luck with your family. Maybe you should . . . make another one.”

  I felt my face redden, when I said that. A blurted stupid clumsy thing to say. It just came out. But understand: I’m not a good-looking guy, I’m shaped like a salt shaker, I’m short, I’ve got a bald spot, a nose like a tuber. Not a lot of experience. And I had been thinking about going to bed with her since I saw her sitting behind the counter, gazing sadly out the dirty window . . .

  She gave her almost-smile, then, and looked at me with something close to real interest. Finally she said, “My sister’s the one who’s done the best— she got out of Bisbee. She’s in San Diego, she teaches school.”

  “San Diego!”

  “I know—that’s where you’re from. Well, she got divorced. But she’s dating a guy. And she likes teaching, I guess. Do you like rock music?”

  I pretended to be a lot more interested in rock music than I was and expressed a liking for Janis Joplin.

  “There’s a concert up in Phoenix I’d like to go to this weekend,” she said, with a somewhat theatrical wistfulness. “The Cactus Ridge Festival, but I can’t really afford to get there and back.”

  “In fact,” I lied, without hesitation, “I’m planning to go to that same concert . . . So, uh, if . . .”

  I remember walking in the desert dusk, hand in hand with Becky.

  It was yet another cemetery. This one she didn’t mind—it was Boot Hill, in Tombstone, Arizona, carefully preserved: the town lived on entirely through tourism.

  At this hour the wooden tombstones were darkening to silhouettes, seemed like something grown from the sandy dun earth like the cacti, the small twisted desert trees. We saw Les Moore’s grave: no Les, no more. We had to look close, in the fading light, to see the grave marker of Billy Clanton.

  Murdered in the Streets of Tombstone.

  I’d brought her to get a Kodak of her with the marker of her ancestor, for inclusion in my book. And because I thought it was my best shot for getting her into bed. She’d been pretty warm during the concert, and afterward, she squeezed my hand before rushing into the house. The trip to Arizona meant two rooms in the motel, but the rest of the time we were together, and now, gazing down at Billy’s grave, she let me take her hand and keep holding it.

  She seemed almost happy. With its constant references to her ancestor— her martyred ancestor, in the view of anti-Earp historians—Tombstone made her feel important. When I introduced her as Billy’s great-granddaughter, much was made of her. She was interviewed and photographed for the local paper.

  “It’s funny,” she said, gazing down at the grave. A prickly pear cactus, beginning to bud, was sprouting from the spot corresponding to Billy Clanton’s heart. “I feel almost happy—because I’m part of a famous tragedy . . .”

  “Some say it was a tragedy, some say it was Earp and Holliday heroics . . .”

  “I can’t go with heroics. And if Billy’d lived he might’ve married Isabella, and then . . . maybe things would’ve been better in my family.”

  That planted the seed of what was to come. It started
me thinking about her psychotherapeutically. It occurred to me that if I helped her, made her feel better about herself, she’d feel more attachment to me.

  As if reading my thoughts, Becky turned to me, as the cemetery caretaker shouted at us that they were closing for the night; she turned her face to me—tilting it down, because she was a little taller. She leaned closer, and she let me kiss her.

  Then she put her arms around me, and whispered in my ear, “You give me hope.”

  That night in bed she gave me hope, too.

  Nine days later, Becky’s mother was dead. Out on a drunk, the old woman had stumbled into the street, and had been run over by a Ford pickup truck with beer kegs in the back.

  Becky hadn’t been close to her mother, but the death seemed to backhand her emotionally; it sent her reeling. “She wasn’t much good, but she loved me the best she knew how,” Becky said at the funeral. Becky and I were the only ones attending that cut-rate event. “She was all I had. Every Sunday morning, hangover or not, she made me breakfast . . .”

  I told her, “I’ll make breakfast for you on Sunday.” And that seemed to help. We got closer, then, Becky and I. We went to more concerts, we went on trips—I fought with the college administration to get the time. She came out to visit San Diego . . . and when I popped the question, she said yes. She only thought about it for an hour or two.

  We got married in San Diego. And at the wedding, which we held at the Hotel del Coronado, one of the guests was my Uncle Roger who brought his “partner”—a rather taciturn man, a doctor named Crosswell. While we were waiting for the bride to come out, we started talking about the Coronado, a landmark built in 1888, and about old hotels, and I said how visiting old places, for me, could feel like time travel, and the doctor stared at me—and asked, rather suspiciously, what had prompted the remark.

  Roger looked at him and said, “He doesn’t know about Collier. Almost no one does. Forget it.”

  But when my uncle wandered off to get a drink, I pressed Crosswell, my journalistic instinct piqued, and he muttered something rather grumpily about having a transcription of certain tape recordings by a Richard Collier who’d stayed at this hotel, and allegations of Collier’s experiments in time travel. References to Collier’s obsession with one Elise McKenna.

  Then out came Becky in her wedding dress, really smiling for once, and drove away all thoughts of my being anywhere, anytime, but right there.

  We were happy for as long as Becky was capable of being happy, which was a week or so, and then we were happy sporadically for a time . . . and then only I was happy. And after a while, when I realized I was alone in that gladness, neither of us were.

  It all came down to the implicit tragedy of Becky’s life—of life itself, in Becky’s view. If we went on a walk, Becky was sure to notice a dead bird in the gutter; if we went to the beach she saw the trash on the sand and a bird pecking out the eyes of a dead fish, and didn’t seem to notice anything else; if we went to Disneyland she pointed out the wasteland of parking lot and the high prices and the long lines; she speculated on the exhaustion and resentment of the people dressed as Goofy and Mickey. At home, she listened to a great deal of Tim Buckley and the Velvet Underground and she re-read The Bell Jar. Reading The Bell Jar more than once should be in some clinical psychology book as a warning sign.

  “Don’t you see?” she’d say to me. “I’m doomed. It’s in my blood to be doomed. Some people are born losers—it’s built into their chromosomes. You’ve hitched your wagon to a falling star . . .”

  She started sleeping twelve, fourteen hours a day, and not getting out of bed when she did wake up. The house fell into a piled-up disorder like a sculpture representing her depression. She started talking about suicide. Suicidal depression had been a black tsunami poised over her just before we’d met—and then my intercession had let her run from it, for a time. But it couldn’t be outrun, she insisted. The giant black wave was falling on her at last. Perhaps, she suggested, we could die together . . .

  I went to see my Uncle Roger, but really it was to talk to Crosswell. “You’re a physician, Doctor Crosswell—do you know somebody good for this kind of illness?”

  He recommended a Dr. Hale Vennetty. I went to see him, for a consultation about my wife. He was a tall pale dour psychiatrist with a phlegmatic, fatalistic air, and he was convinced that once a person was “imprinted” by their childhood, that imprint was their destiny and there was little to be done, though electroshock could be tried. He was interested in Becky’s case, since it had an affinity with his pet theory, evolved mostly to account for cyclic ghetto miseries: parental abandonment led to a tendency to abandon one’s own children, as if the abandoner were re-enacting the despair of their own childhood. It was a vicious circle that spiraled through the generations, abandonment leading to abandonment. “Why,” he chuckled, “the only way to change it, really, once the imprint has happened, would be to travel back in time and persuade someone who started the cycle of abandonment not to do it . . .”

  I couldn’t believe it was hopeless. I went to two more doctors, one of whom suggested an experimental new drug, something called an “antidepressant.” I was planning to persuade Becky to sign on for the experimental therapy program . . .

  I’d talk to her about it, I decided, right after I got back from Albuquerque.

  Then she was dead. I was alone.

  I would grieve, and find someone else. Someone healthier.

  But I drank a great deal of beer, and over ate, and put on forty pounds, becoming even less attractive. Worse, I was dogged by self-loathing that other people infallibly sensed. Self-loathing is not an attractive quality. But I couldn’t shake it. I just kept thinking I could have saved her, after all. If I had stayed with her . . . Hadn’t gone on that trip. I’d known she was at risk for suicide but I went anyway. Because she was becoming a burden to me—I wanted to get away from her.

  I tried blaming it on her sister Sandra. If only she’d let me talk to Becky that night, I might’ve cheered her up . . .

  But it didn’t take. I blamed myself. I spent much of 1975 and most of 1976 blaming myself . . .

  By degrees, I became fixated on Vennetty’s theory, his cycle of abandonment. Then I remembered Crosswell’s story about Collier. The recordings. The tale of time travel . . .

  Crosswell wouldn’t talk about it. But I had a key to my Uncle’s house because I fed their four cats when they were out of town. I let myself in one day and searched the file box in the den Crosswell used for an office. It took me all of five minutes to find the manila envelope, at the back of the lowest drawer, with the transcription of the tapes. I took it home and read it with a mixture of dread, disbelief, and growing excitement.

  The description of the method used for time travel had an eerie verisimilitude for me. On rare occasions, as I’d hinted to Crosswell, I’d experienced something of the sort myself. In the little ghost towns I’d visited, I had felt, sometimes, for perhaps just a second, that the veil of the ages had drawn back, and I’d glimpsed the town in its teeming heyday; had smelled the reeking mules and the reeking prospectors, had blinked in the rising dust . . . before it had faded away. I had almost . . . almost traveled in time.

  Collier’s process was the same method, crystallized by fanatical dedication. It was a psychological, then a psychic, process. You surrounded yourself with artifacts of the era you wanted to travel to. You dressed for the era. You visualized the era. You fixed the date and time in your mind. You repeated, over and over again, the time, the place, the destination you wanted to travel to. You visualized, you visualized, you visualized. And since the quantum uncertainty hidden at the heart of the universe is penetrable by mind itself, a persistent man might just project himself into the past through sheer force of will . . .

  Was it really possible? Was it possible I could project myself a year into the past, and stop Becky’s death?

  The apartment Becky had died in had grim associations for Sandra and she’d recentl
y given it up. I rented it, splurging my tiny savings to do it, and sat on a chair in the bedroom, staring at a newspaper from the day before Becky had died—it’d taken some doing to get hold of it. Then I tried for hours to travel back to that night . . .

  Now and then, there was a flicker. I almost went. The room would shift— Sandra’s old furniture would start to appear. Once I thought I glimpsed Becky. But the trouble was, 1975 was too much like 1976. It wasn’t different enough, somehow, for the mind to find its bearings. I kept slipping back to my own time.

  But I had confirmed that time travel was possible. I had gone into the past—if only for a moment. And there was one other possibility for saving Becky. Suppose . . .

  Suppose I took seriously what Dr. Vennetty had suggested facetiously. Suppose I traveled back to the time of the Old West’s Billy Clanton—and stopped him from being there, in Tombstone, that October day in 1881. He was reputed to be a pretty good-natured kid, overall. With any luck, if he weren’t shot down in the OK Corral fight, he’d marry Isabella, and he’d stay with her, and raise that child, and the cycle of abandonment would be broken, and that child’s children would not be marked with despair, would not be imprinted, and Rebecca Clanton would not be seeded with depression—and suicide.

  I freely confess, I wasn’t quite in my right mind in those days. I felt haunted by Becky—as if some black shimmering from her despair had settled over me, an invisible cloak I always wore. It drew itself over my eyes, and made me see things in extremes. Forgetting about Becky, letting her go, was not an option. I had to save her—or die myself.

  So I went to Tombstone, Arizona, in October 1976—went there in period costume. It isn’t strange to dress in the manner of the 1880s there. No one even stared at my frock coat, the watch and chain on my weskit, the silk top hat. I rented a room in a bed-and-breakfast, a tourist-outfitted building that had existed in 1881, and retreated to a room already furnished with the right antiques. My pockets were heavy with silver dollars wrapped in outdated paper money. I’d sold my car to get enough money to buy the antique funds from a numismatist. I even had a small pistol, circa 1879, hidden in my coat.