How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  “Dad?” was all I could say.

  “I told him this morning what we were doing,” she said, “and he’s been checking into the legalities of helping this woman, which is all legal, and taking your sisters to your Aunt Cheryl’s and getting us a reservation at a campground in Great Basin National Park. He’s home packing his van now. He and I agree this will be a great chance for the three of us to talk. Here are the keys to my car,” and she handed me her car keys.

  I gave Mom my car keys and realized I maybe had some rethinking to do about my dad. Maybe I’d been running the wrong programs about him and let a few I/O errors affect my brain and keep me from seeing things right. I guess I’d find out. Fat Joe walked over, and I looked up at him. “So what’s going on?” he asked.

  “This boy’s your best driver,” Mom said. “I need his services.” And she pulled out a hundred-dollar bill from her purse and handed it to Fat Joe. “That should cover any inconvenience you’ll incur from his absence this weekend.”

  Well, Fat Joe was all smiles then, and I knew my job was secure if I took off the next week, not just the weekend. The funny thing was, Fat Joe probably didn’t even know that this was my own mother doing all this, and I sure didn’t tell him. He came out to help me put a Happy Pizza clown face on the hood of Mom’s Mustang, and it looked so stupid there, but then, it looked stupid on any car.

  When we walked back in, Mom was pacing up and down, looking at her watch, and then the phone rang. We all just looked at it till it rang again, then we all dived for it, but Mom got it and it was the lady. “Yes, I’ve got your address right here in my purse,” and she read it back to her. “Ten minutes,” Mom said, and she hung up and handed me a paper with the address on it. “Go, Clayton,” she said, and I started for the door, but Fat Joe said, “Don’t you need a pizza?” and Mom said, “For heaven’s sake, yes, but who cares what it is or if it’s even cooked,” so the kitchen help rushed a frozen Italian sausage and pineapple out in a box, and I ran for the car.

  The address read Layton Avenue, which meant out to I-15, down to 21st South, east to West Temple, then north five blocks to Layton. I got there in seven minutes. The three kids were out sitting on the lawn, and the oldest, a girl maybe five years old, took the hands of the others and started walking them toward the car. I left the door open for them and left the car running, hoping the kids had sense enough not to touch anything, and I walked the frozen pizza up the steps to the door and rang the doorbell. The lady answered it, and I couldn’t even talk for a minute when I saw her in real-land. Her eyes were both black, and her wrists were bandaged and there were bruises along her neck above her shirt collar, and her hair was a wreck. She looked at me with tears in her eyes, and I thought, Lady, don’t back out now, your kids just climbed into my car. She handed me a ten, and I gave her the pizza and said I’d have to go get change from the car, could she come out for it? She nodded and set the pizza on the TV. Some man I could barely see on the couch growled, “This doesn’t even smell like a pizza. Where did you order it from?” But the lady just walked out of the house and followed me down the steps. She stopped and pulled a suitcase out of the bushes by the front door and hurried to put it on the floor in the backseat. The kids were in the back. We climbed in, and I started backing out and I looked at the lady again and thought how I’d known that people look better in VR because you can touch yourself up after you’re in, so I should have known a woman would take away black eyes and bruises. I should have looked ahead and been prepared for seeing her in real-land, but I hadn’t and it was hard to look at her now. That’s when the husband ran out of the house. He must have looked in the pizza box and seen that the pizza was frozen, then looked out the window to see that his family was making an escape. I could easily outdistance him in a Mustang, and he turned and ran back to the house.

  “He’ll follow,” the lady said. “Can you drive this thing?”

  I didn’t even answer her. I just took us out onto I-15 and started the game. It was all the answer she needed. She turned around and buckled the kids in, then buckled herself in.

  We weren’t going to have an easy time of blending into the traffic in Mom’s red Mustang with a Happy Pizza clown face flapping on the hood, and I just hoped her husband was way behind us somewhere, which was too much to hope for. The lady was watching behind. “Here he comes,” she said. “White Bronco, center lane. He’ll want to kill you, because he’ll think I’ve been stepping out with you.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “What about you and the kids?” I asked the lady, finally. “What will he do to all of you?”

  “He’ll just want to hurt me. The kids don’t matter to him yet.”

  So play the game, I thought. Play it better than you ever have. He was right behind us and gaining, doing ninety plus. I sped up to over ninety and thought that this is what I would do: come up fast on the speed trap at 33rd South, get in the inside lane, then slow down fast, send the Bronco speeding past, the sure prey of any cop waiting there. We came up fast onto 33rd South, I took the inside lane and braked. The Bronco sped past in the middle lane.

  But there was no cop.

  “Now he’s in front of us,” was all the lady said.

  He slowed right down in the middle lane, so I got in the fast lane and punched it. When we were alongside each other, doing eighty plus, he tried to shout something out his window. The lady wouldn’t look at him. The five-year-old girl climbed out of her buckle and over the seat into her mother’s arms. She looked at her dad, but didn’t wave. The other two kids started crying because they wanted to come up into the front seat, too, but the lady just ignored them. I punched it again to get past her husband, and he swerved in behind us — I didn’t know if he’d meant to hit the back of the car or what, but he was right on our tail, and speeding up behind us to maybe ram us. I shoved the Mustang up to ninety plus, and he was still gaining.

  I merged right, and he followed us. We passed a Smith’s grocery store semi in the middle lane and just ahead a white Lincoln was going to roadblock us doing seventy. I got an idea and slowed down while the semi closed up the space between us. The lady’s husband slowed down, too, though he stayed right on our tail. He didn’t ram us after all. I waited till there was room for just us to merge into the middle lane between the semi and the Lincoln and did it. The semi let out a blat of horn and I sped ahead. The Bronco was sandwiched back behind the Lincoln and the semi.

  We’d passed the 45th South exit and were coming up on 53rd South and one mile later the I-215 turnoff. The white Bronco reappeared behind us. He’d slowed down, gotten around the semi, and was speeding up toward us again. “I know where I can get some cops,” I said.

  At least I hoped I did. They were always there when you didn’t want them: just off the I-15 merge lanes onto I-215 heading west toward Redwood Road. I’d gotten my first ticket there after starting work for Fat Joe and Happy Pizza. Be there today, cops, I thought. Just be there. I didn’t care if they pulled us all over and helped us sort out the mess. The husband couldn’t make his wife stay with him, and he couldn’t kill me if there were cops around.

  So I got in the inside lane, passed 53rd South, and headed for the I-215 exit. The Bronco followed. I dropped down onto I-215, doing eighty plus, and braked. The Bronco changed lanes and sped past to get ahead of us, and a cop pulled out after him, lights flashing and then the siren started up.

  We stayed well behind the chase, and eventually the Bronco pulled over. We drove past them, turned around at Redwood Road, and headed back east for I-15. The police still had the Bronco and the lady’s husband pulled over when we went past.

  “He’s probably telling them that you kidnapped us,” the lady said.

  “You can straighten things out at the courthouse in Provo,” I said.

  We got onto I-15 and headed south past 72nd South. I realized I was breathing hard and tried to slow it down. I also slowed down the car. After all, I had a mother and her three kids in the car with me and no reason
to race anymore. I dropped us down to seventy and kept it there. The lady turned around and unstrapped her crying kids and took them all into the front seat with her and held them, quieted them down. “Thank you,” the lady said to me, almost in a whisper, looking straight ahead.

  “My name is Clayton,” I said, suddenly thinking it was important for her to know that.

  She looked at me, then, but didn’t smile. “I’m Elizabeth. The oldest one here is Jane. This is Amy; and my youngest is Clayton, like you.”

  There wasn’t much else for us to say. Not then. We drove past Draper and the prison, then started up the Point of the Mountain. When we drove over the top, we could see Utah Valley. There were the green wheatfields and the orchards around Alpine, the snow on the blue mountains. I-15 stretched out below us and ahead, to the south. It all looked nearly as good as it looked in VR, though I could see the cities from the Point if I looked hard, so I stopped looking and we dropped down into the valley and I couldn’t see them anymore. We’d be in Provo in thirty minutes anyway, and then my parents would come.

  I thought about that and decided to tell them about the Peace Corps later that night around the campfire when it was just the three of us, after we’d dropped Elizabeth off at her sister’s, the three of us without TV so we could talk, away from the things that reminded us of all the programs in our lives, out under stars in the cold mountain air and the only sounds the sounds of our crackling fire and the wind in the trees and our voices. Our lives would all seem short and valuable out there, and our dreams worth dreaming. I got that hit-in-the-gut feeling of excitement again, and it was strong because it came from being excited about talking to my parents and from being able to drive my mother’s red Mustang down the road I’d wanted to take in the net, where the road out looked so achingly beautiful.

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  LOCK DOWN

  As soon as the last member of Night Team A hauls his tired ass up the ladder, you lead your team down it, into the time bubble. The bubble smells like sweat, and Megan hits on the fan first thing, like always, though you all know it won’t chase out the smell: you don’t give the fan time to make the bubble smell decent.

  You don’t have the time to give it.

  “Secure hatch,” you call back to Megan, your operations expert, and you know she’s already started, you can hear the bolts slamming into place. You don’t even bother to order Paulo to replace the battery and check the cabling in the time stabilizer because you’ve heard him snap open the case and tear into it, and while you check that the time stabilizer is synchronized with Mission Control/Greenwich/Tokyo you think: this is a good team. These people know their jobs, and you know yours, and you can do your jobs. The three of you are Deep Night Team B, and you want to be promoted to Deep Night Team A before the break in time is locked down, which means you’ve got to break some records — which means you’ll work to maybe lock down a whole day on this shift.

  “Hatch sealed,” Megan calls out.

  You flip switches that start the pressurization, and the constant hiss you hear behind all your work starts up again.

  “Batteries replaced, full charge, ready to go,” Paulo calls out. You’ll work till the batteries are within 4 or 5 percent of 10. You won’t come back sooner no matter how much actual time you’ve worked. “Cables check out 100 percent.”

  “Hatch double check, Paulo,” you tell him. “Megan, battery and cable double check.”

  You double-, then triple-check everybody’s work because you don’t ever want to be in fractured time with a bad seal or bad batteries. You don’t know exactly what happens to teams lost, for a time, like that — it’s classified info — but the rumors aren’t good, and you don’t want to find out which are true and which are stupid stories like the ones older guys told you when you started training for this job. Besides, you know without being told the two choices a lost team has: suffocate, or depressurize to take on air — and expose yourselves to a timeline on which maybe nothing adds up to you and you are sundered from existence. You check the backup batteries yourself. You check the seals on the hatch and the main batteries yourself after Megan and Paulo have checked them. You all check the time stabilizer, its cables, its synchronization, the air tanks, and the virtual tether that hooks you back to real time and snakes out silver behind your bubble through the fractured mess you’re heading into.

  A green light flashes above the main computer: Mission Control’s info dump is finished. You’ve got the data hundreds of research teams brought back since the last shift went out, true time data on everything and everyone surrounding the point in time you’re going to. You strap yourselves in. Out of all the chronometers in front of you, you look first at the one in the upper-left-hand corner of your console, the one that records the total amount of time the last team managed to lock down: 2 hours, 13 minutes, 17.56.24 seconds — what were they doing? You think: a whole shift for only two hours and thirteen minutes.

  “Move us out,” you radio to Mission Control.

  And they move you out into fractured time.

  The radio is instantly dead. You know you’re there. You follow back the break, which occurred between 12:11:32:46:22 P.M. on July 14, 1864, and a time you remember, not too far back, that you don’t like to think about. Teams are working from both ends of the break, and yours is working up from the bottom: you’re at March 19, 1948, following Marian Anderson, the opera singer, because the break centers on one life and the events in it, and for now it’s centered on Marian Anderson — and from each breath she takes, from each turn of her head so that she sees something new, from each word she speaks to another person, uncountable futures shatter off, and all the possible actions of all the people she meets or passes or speaks to become possible again, all the evil in their hearts and all the good, and it’s your job to lock down what actually happened, no matter what that is, no matter what you watch, because no one knows if the world can persist if you don’t get it right.

  And no one knows how much time you’ve got to get time right.

  “Night Team locked down at 6:45:10:59:36 P.M., March 19, 1948,” Paulo calls out behind you, to your left. “That’s where we start.”

  “Hold us there, Megan,” you say, while you check the probability calculations on record at the end of Night Team A’s shift. Computer checks them out at 100 percent. Hand calcs say the same. “Move us forward,” you say.

  And time starts running.

  You watch Marian Anderson try to hold the train of her burgundy satin concert gown out of wet snow as Franz Rupp, her accompanist, helps her climb out the window of her room in Hotel Utah and start down the fire escape. Franz follows her out. Bessie George, Marian’s servant and friend, closes and latches the window behind them, then takes the stairs down and exits through the hotel’s main doors.

  You’d already followed them as they’d boarded the Great Northern in Vancouver for Salt Lake City the day after Marian’s concert on March 15, and you’d locked that down, and you’d been the team that locked down their arrival in Salt Lake on March 18, at 9:45 A.M. on the dot — trains had prided themselves on being on time like that back then, utterly dependable — and you’d followed her in the taxi through heavy snow and almost impassable streets to Hotel Utah, where the doorman had stopped Marian from entering through the main doors under the canopy that sheltered them from the blizzard. When Franz had protested, the manager had come out to stop Marian from entering, and finally Franz had gone in to check them all in to the hotel. They hadn’t known where else to go in a blizzard or if anywhere in Salt Lake would treat them any better. Marian had stood outside on the sidewalk with Bessie and all their luggage. After a time, Franz had walked out with keys to their rooms. He’d looked embarrassed, but Marian hadn’t seemed at all embarrassed or surprised when he’d led her around to the servants’ entrance to the kitchens and an icy fire escape above the first two floors. Bessie had taken the keys, helped a bellboy collect all the luggage, went through the main doors and up to
their rooms on the sixth floor to open the windows to Franz and Marian.

  “Marian’s better than all those people who don’t want her in their hotel,” Megan had said.

  It disgusts you to see the meanness thrown at Marian in places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and now this place. It disgusts you to have to lock it down — to realize that no place in America treated her better.

  “She sings Brahms and makes people weep,” Paulo had said.

  And Marian was black. In America in 1948, that meant you couldn’t go through the front doors of a hotel.

  You’d already locked that into true time on your last shift, and on this shift it is now time for Marian’s concert in the Mormon Tabernacle on Temple Square. You watch her climb down the icy fire escape, trying to hold her concert gown out of the slush, and walk the half block to the Tabernacle to warm up — “literally,” Megan says — for her concert. Franz goes to work immediately to make sure the piano is tuned — oh, the Tabernacle staff assures him it is, but he checks anyway, and he plunks away at a key he can’t get right, tightening, then loosening the string, then tightening it again, while Marian runs through scales in the space under the choir seats — the Tabernacle equivalent of backstage — and Bessie makes Marian a lukewarm tea and squeezes a lemon into it. The Tabernacle fills to less than half capacity — exactly 2,347 people — though in that small audience the Democratic governor of Utah, Herbert Brown Maw, and his wife Florence take good seats near the front.