Smith's Monthly #21

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “Not in the slightest,” I said. “But the problem is we don’t often have missions and you need something to keep you occupied.”

  “To help you keep that thing in your diapers,” Stan said.

  “It’s not a diaper,” Chadwick said in his gruff voice, glaring at Stan.

  “Poker Boy is right,” Cherry said, nodding to me with thanks. “If you want to be on Poker Boy’s team, which is a very high honor, you need to stay out of trouble and do something constructive.”

  “And just what would that be?” Chadwick asked, looking disgusted. “I’ve been bored for most of the last thousand years. Being a cherub just doesn’t have a lot of purpose these days. So I’m open to suggestions.”

  Because we were between a moment in time, the frozen poker room around us was deadly silent and now the four of us were as well. I just couldn’t think of a thing for Chadwick to do.

  Nothing.

  THREE

  I glanced up and saw the two frozen birds that he had brought in with him. And the bird poop hanging in midair like a promise yet to be kept.

  “What’s with the birds?” I asked, trying to buy some time to think.

  “I like birds and they like me,” he said. “It’s fun flying with them.”

  I had a faint glimmering of an idea, but I wasn’t sure about it. I needed more information.

  “Can you talk to them?”

  “Not much,” Chadwick said. “They aren’t that smart.”

  I turned to Stan and Cherry. “Is there a god of birds? Or a god who looks over that area of the animal kingdom?”

  Both Stan and Cherry looked puzzled.

  “Not really,” Stan said. “The Smoke’s boss would be the most likely, but most gods tend to have one bird or another that they favor, but no one that I know is over all the birds in general.”

  “So they have no god really looking out for them?” I asked, surprised. I thought every aspect of the world had a god over it.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Cherry said looking very puzzled. “Odd, don’t you think?”

  I turned to Chadwick. “How about you make it your job to save birds and watch out over them?”

  He just looked puzzled.

  “You said you like them, right?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “And you can fly faster than any bird, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “So make it your job to save birds. If a bird is about to fly in front of a truck, save it. Save birds trapped in a cage in a burning house. Save birds from being shot by kids.”

  Both Cherry and Stan were smiling, so I knew I had them on board with the idea.

  And Chadwick was nodding slowly as he thought about it.

  “There is clearly no one else doing it,” I said. “And from the number of dead birds I’ve seen over the years, clearly it needs to be done.”

  Chadwick nodded. “I’ve saved a few birds along the way and it always felt good.”

  “Cherry,” I said, turning to Chadwick’s boss, “you want to check with the appropriate god in charge to make sure it would be all right if Chadwick took up this great mission?”

  “I think it will be,” she said, smiling at me and looking very relieved.

  I turned back to Chadwick. “And I’ll still need you on my team on some missions if that’s all right with you. Your special powers could really help at times.”

  Chadwick was nodding and smiling. “Sure, sure, and if I find something big that I need help on, I can get your help as well?”

  “Of course,” I said, smiling. “The entire team if need be.”

  “Great,” he said.

  He turned to Cherry. “I really like this idea. Much better than going around shooting people with stupid magic arrows like my dad does.”

  “I agree,” Cherry said. “It is a perfect mission for you. Perfect, and will do a ton of good.”

  “Thanks, Poker Boy,” Chadwick said.

  “Yes, thank you,” Cherry said.

  And then they were both gone along with the two birds, but the big drop of bird poop still hung there.

  “Looks like you have a new member of the team,” Stan said, shaking his head. “Hard to imagine.”

  I just laughed. “Patty is never going to believe that I invited Chadwick the Famous Flashing Cherub to join the team.”

  “If he can keep the little thing in his diaper,” Stan said, also laughing, “he just might be able to help at times.”

  “He might at that,” I said. “But if nothing else we saved a lot of birds tonight.”

  Stan vanished, but I could still hear him laughing.

  I grabbed a couple handfuls of napkins and went back to my chair at the poker table. I placed the napkin under the bird poop and then let myself slip back into the time stream.

  The noise of the casino crashed in around me as the bird poop hit the napkins and I swept them up before anyone noticed.

  I just hoped that cleaning up crap wasn’t a sign of the times ahead with Chadwick the Flashing Cherub.

  Shoeless Joe Jackson made a mistake and was banned from baseball for life.

  Sometimes, in the Garden Lounge, the special jukebox lets a customer go back in time to a mistake and fix it.

  Shoeless Joe never had a chance to let the jukebox help him fix his mistake, but instead it allowed Shoeless Joe to do something even more important: Help a child become a better adult.

  “Black Betsy” first appeared in the anthology Alternate Outlaws from TOR Books edited by Mike Resnick.

  BLACK BETSY

  A Jukebox Story

  ONE

  Eleven in the morning, December 5th.

  The time and the day stuck in my head like the memory of my first kiss or the memory of my dad dying. The weather that morning had turned unseasonably cold. Not baseball weather at all. A storm coming down the west coast from Alaska was projected to bring four inches of snow to the valley floor and light snow was already falling. The storm would eventually drop almost a foot of snow and shut down the schools for two days. But that wasn’t what I remembered about December 5th. What I remembered about that morning was Edward Toole. I turned on the jukebox that morning and sent him back to 1951.

  Back to a time when baseball was important to him and to one other very special man.

  I had just finished the morning bookkeeping for the Garden Lounge, made the deposit from the night before, and started the prep work for the day. Light snowflakes swirled in a whirlwind just inside the front door as Edward entered. He brushed off his coat, stamped his feet hard twice, and then moved through the empty tables toward the bar. He was a big man, thick shoulders, thick waist, with thinning brown and gray hair, and dark, brooding eyes. He was the last person I would have expected to show up in the Garden at eleven in the morning. He worked as a house lawyer for the big computer firm to the south of town. He had a wife, two boys, and was the town’s Little League baseball coach. His usual drink was bourbon and water, with a twist of lemon. He never had more than three in any given night and never before five.

  He didn’t look up as he approached the bar, which was also rare. Usually he was one of the most open and smiling people who came through the door.

  “Morning, Stout,” he said quietly as he pulled out a bar stool. He took his coat off and draped it over the stool next to him, then climbed onto the stool closest to where I was working at the well. I had been cutting fruit, so I still had limes, lemons, and oranges scattered on the waitress station next to him.

  “Edward,” I said. “Good to see you. Out of the office early today. Heading home before it gets too deep out there?” I wiped the lime juice off my hands and slid a bar napkin in front of him. “What can I get for you?”

  “The usual,” he said, then swung around on the stool and faced out over the empty lounge. “You know,” he said, seeming to stare off at the front door. “This place looks the same during the day as it does at night.” He laughed. “Even the same smell of smoke and cleaner
. For some reason I thought it would be different.”

  I glanced around. The Garden was a small bar by current standards. More like a neighborhood bar in the old fifties tradition. It had a dozen vinyl booths, six tables, and a bunch of plants, mostly fake ferns. The walls were a natural wood, dark brown, and the carpet was the same dark brown color. The old oak bar filled the wall opposite the front door in front of a mirror and glass racks. A classic jukebox was framed in real plants to the right of the bar. Except for Christmas Eve, the jukebox was never plugged in. Background music was supplied by the stereo I hid behind the bar.

  Most of the customers said the Garden felt comfortable, like an old sweater. For me it had been home for five years. And since I had never been married, my regular customers, like Edward, were the only family I had.

  I cut a twist off a fresh lemon, slid it along the edge of the glass, dropped it in the golden bourbon, and set the glass on the napkin in front of him.

  He twisted around to face me, holding a strained smile in place. “I suppose,” he said, “since there are no windows, there would be no reason for this place to notice the time of day. I just hadn’t thought about it before.” He picked up the drink, nodding thank you, and downed half of it.

  In all the years I had been serving him I had never seen him do anything but sip his bourbon. Not even the night his Little League team won the state championship. “Everything all right on the home front? Carol and the kids?” I asked, picking up a lime and going back to slicing.

  He finished the rest of the drink and slid it toward me for a refill. “They’re fine. Or at least they were this morning.” He paused for a moment, then said hesitantly, “But I just got fired.”

  “Holy shit! You’re kidding.”

  Edward gave me another strained smile as I picked up his empty glass and moved to refill it. “Wish I was. Seems I made a bad choice a couple months back. Since what I did seems to be unethical, they had no choice but to fire me. And it seems that the State Bar will yank my license to practice law, too.”

  I finished making the drink in silence and placed it in front of him. “It was that serious?”

  He nodded. “Mostly stupid on my part. I guess I knew better. Just wasn’t thinking.”

  I stood across from him, waiting for him to continue. Tell me what he had done. He took a sip off his drink, looked up at me and asked, “You ever hear of Shoeless Joe?”

  “The old baseball player they made the movie about?”

  Edward nodded. “That’s the one. Joseph Jefferson Jackson—Shoeless Joe. I had a chance to meet him once, back when I was fifteen. Back in 1951 in South Carolina. But I was too afraid to go into his bedroom with my baseball coach and two of the other players. Back then I really wanted to be a professional ball player when I grew up and everyone knew that Shoeless Joe Jackson was the best left fielder to ever play the game. And one of the best hitters ever. I guess as a kid I just didn’t have the courage to meet him. He died two days later and I always blamed myself.”

  I slowly shook my head, took a deep breath and looked down at the fruit I had been cutting. None of this was making sense. But sometimes that was what a bartender had to expect. When customers needed to talk about problems, very rarely did they make immediate sense. The best thing a bartender could do was just keep them talking until they talked themselves out.

  “You blamed yourself?” I asked. “Why? How old was he?”

  “He was sixty-three. And he was sick. I know all that. He died on December 5th. Forty years ago today. Interesting, huh? That I would get fired on the same day. I think it is a sort of poetic justice.”

  “But if he was sixty-three and sick, why would you blame yourself?”

  Edward took a deep breath and looked quickly around the bar, as if to make sure no one could hear him. Then he looked me right in the eye and said, “I stole Black Betsy. His bat.”

  TWO

  Edward sipped on his entire second drink and he sipped his third through the lunch crowd and a fourth up until we were alone again at two. During that time we talked about what caused him to get fired, how stealing Shoeless Joe’s bat from his house had caused Edward guilt for forty years. During lunch, Edward and two other regular customers filled me in on the entire Black Sox scandal of the 1919 World Series. I learned how Shoeless Joe was the leading hitter for that World Series with a .357 average. How he played errorless ball for the eight game series, yet was still thrown out of baseball for agreeing to take $5,000 to throw the series.

  I learned about Comiskey Park, the White Sox, and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. I learned about the other seven players that were thrown out with Shoeless Joe and about the Ten Day Clause in the old player contracts that led to the entire mess.

  I also learned that Edward was a haunted man. He was haunted by a mistake he made as a kid. For his entire life he continued to make the same sort of bad decisions and mistakes. I also learned that he knew when he entered college that he really didn’t have the talent to be a professional baseball player. He truly loved being a lawyer, but he never lost his love for baseball, and regretted not playing ball for a living.

  At some point during that three-hour period, I decided to break one of my own rules: I would plug in the jukebox, and give Edward a chance to correct that one big mistake.

  THREE

  The jukebox in the Garden Lounge was a time-travel device.

  Actually, every jukebox is a time machine in a limited fashion. When a song is played on a regular jukebox, a person sort of travels back to the time and the memory associated with that song. The Garden jukebox does almost exactly that, with one major difference. It physically takes the person to the memory, and allows that person to be there inside their old body for the length of the song. They are actually there, smelling, tasting, and feeling the past.

  And they can change it, too. Which is why I only allow myself to plug the jukebox in on Christmas Eve and then only for a few close friends every year. Changing the past is way too dangerous. And I have lost a couple of good friends because of it.

  I inherited the jukebox from the junk in the basement of the first bar I owned. Ten minutes before the bank came in to close me down, I hauled the old jukebox out of the basement and into my garage at home, figuring I had the spare time to fix it up. A year later, when I finally got around to opening it up, I discovered a bunch of stuff inside that didn’t belong in a normal jukebox. Stuff that seemed far beyond my limited electrical ability, so I just cleaned off the dust, fixed the electrical cord that looked as if someone had ripped it from the back of the machine, and turned it on.

  Luck had it that the only forty-five I had around the house was a recording of a song that reminded me of the night I almost asked Jenny, the only woman I have ever loved, to marry me. It had been her favorite song. I had the record in a scrapbook with pictures of her and hadn’t listened to it in years.

  I fired up the song and the next thing I knew I was with Jenny. I could feel my fingers touching her hand. I could smell her light perfume. I licked my lips, and tasted the faint cherry from her lipstick. I was there, fumbling, trying to get up enough courage in my twenty-three year-old body to ask her to marry me. Yet I was also there as a thirty-seven year-old man, with the clear memory that I had not asked her. And the next week she had left me for college and eventually another man.

  I sat there beside her, stunned, not talking, until the song ended and I found myself back in my garage.

  The next day I finally got up the courage to play the record again and ended up sitting next to Jenny again. And again at the exact same time and place. That was where my memory from that song took me. That second time I almost asked her to marry me. Almost. It would have changed my life and my future. And I had no idea what that would have meant. My life really wasn’t so bad. I have never had the courage to play Jenny’s song again, even though it is on the jukebox, waiting.

  Since then, every Christmas Eve I have given a few close friends the opportunity to g
o back and relive one memory. Sometimes they change something back there and don’t come back. But most of the time they pop back into the bar as the song ends. Sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, but always more content then before they played the song.

  Now I was going to break my own rule. It was December 5th, 1991, and I was going to plug in the jukebox and give Edward a chance to change his past and his life. I just hoped I was doing the right thing.

  FOUR

  “Well,” Edward said, looking around as the last lunch customer went out into the blowing snow. “I suppose it’s time for me to go home and tell Carol the news.” He shook his head. “Damned if I know what we’re going to do. I’ve never been fired before.”

  I set two dirty glasses in the sink and took a deep breath. “Humor me for a moment. What do you think would have happened if you hadn’t stolen that bat?”

  Edward shrugged. “I would have slept a lot better over the years, that’s for sure.”

  I nodded and went on. “You have a song, or style of song that reminds you of that time you went to see Joe?”

  Edward thought for a moment, then nodded. “Big band stuff. You know, like Dorsey. My mom was always playing it, and I remember a record player on real low, with one of those bands playing on it, when we visited Joe’s house. Why?”

  I pointed at the Wurlitzer jukebox to the right of the bar. “You ever have a song take you back to a memory?”

  “Of course. Who hasn’t?”

  I moved out from behind the bar, reached in behind the polished chrome of the jukebox and plugged it in. A soft whirring came from inside and I could feel my stomach tightening up. I always felt sick every time I turned on the jukebox. The sickness of dread, of worry. The sickness of fear, like going into a bad situation, or knowing the moment before you are going to get hit that you will get hurt.