Tesla's Time Travelers

by Tim Black

  “Buck up, Heath,” Bette advised. “Heck, with the way things have gone today, maybe we won’t even get back to our own time and you won’t have to pull ‘Breakfast Club.’ Look on the bright side,” she added sarcastically.

  Homecoming, Minerva thought. The Homecoming Dance. Was she going to miss the Homecoming Dance? It was going to be her big moment, an old fashioned spotlight dance with Junior, the football star, the girls of the school dying with envy with her every step across the dance floor in the arms of her football Adonis. Suddenly, in her mind, she wasn’t dancing with Junior, but with Victor, and Victor was smiling, but they were both in their colonial costumes. Oh, heavens, she wondered. Was that a premonition? Were they going to be stuck in the past dancing at some Patriot ball? Would she have to spend the rest of her life in petticoats? And corsets? She didn’t even want to think about the chamber pots, or the horse droppings.

  “Minerva?” Victor said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, snapping out her of thoughts. She was blushing. “Let’s check in with Mr. Greene.”

  As they walked up Arch Street and turned the corner, Mrs. Beard returned from her scouting mission.

  “What did you see, Mrs. Beard?” Minerva asked.

  “A longboat,” Mary Beard replied.

  “What about the longboat?” Victor asked.

  “It’s filled with soldiers, and they are headed from Mud Island this way,” she said. “They didn’t seem happy.”

  “What’s going on?” Victor asked.

  “The soldiers fired on us,” Minerva said.

  “You mean with bullets?” Victor asked.

  “I would say musket balls to be correct,” Bette said.

  “What?”

  “Well, Victor,” Minerva said. “We sort of had to tie up the soldier that was guarding the twins.”

  “They had us digging their stupid moat,” Justin whined. His twin brother Heath didn’t say a thing. Minerva assumed Heath was conjuring up images of Saturday School. He had been hit over the head with the “Breakfast Club” and he would be useless for the rest of the trip. That was the bad news. The good news was that he would also be harmless.

  “So,” Bette said. “I think we made a few soldiers pretty angry. I mean, two girls overcame a guard? That guy must really be taking heat.”

  “Tough on the 18th century male ego,” Minerva added.

  “Tough on male ego in any century,” Bette said.

  They laughed in unison. Sisters at last!

  Chapter 13

  Take charge, Victor, Victor Bridges told himself. You are the president of the club. He looked at his peers standing there, gazing at one another in stunned silence in the middle of Arch Street, and waiting like a herd of sheep for some type of order, or for a carriage to run them over.

  “Let me have your attention, people,” Victor said. “I’m going to see what is up with the soldiers. You four go check in with Mr. Greene,” he ordered. His “sheep” looked at one another. Victor half expected someone to say, “Bahhh.”

  “That might be dangerous, Victor,” Minerva said.

  “Why? They haven’t seen me,” Victor replied. “They can identify you guys, but they don’t know me. I can find out if they are really looking for you or just coming to Philadelphia to hang out.”

  “He’s right, Minerva,” Bette agreed.

  “Mrs. Beard, would you accompany me?” Victor asked the ghost.

  Mrs. Beard beamed. “Why of course, young man,” she said, sounding a bit like a coquette with a hint of flirtation in her voice. Victor wondered if all ghosts were as goofy as Mrs. Beard. But then again, it must be a drag being a ghost. What would he miss most if he were a ghost? Food. He doubted there was pizza in Paradise. Or cheeseburgers, no matter what Jimmy Buffett sang in that song of his.

  A dozen soldiers in Patriot blue uniforms and tri-corner hats were standing on a wharf as their commander, a man of about thirty with a no-nonsense square jaw look about him, asked questions of the locals. The soldiers reminded Victor of Revolutionary War re-enactors he had once seen at Valley Forge on a summer vacation, but these weren’t re-enactors, these guys were real, with real muskets and real bayonets that were ominously fixed to the ends of their weapons. Mary Beard floated in and around the young men, evaluating each soldier’s physique with an appreciative eye as if she were at a Chippendale show. Victor shook his head; he couldn’t believe God would allow dirty old ladies in heaven. Maybe the Beards had only made it to Purgatory and were in the line for heaven like the tourists at Space Mountain at Disneyworld, but with a celestial sign that read, “Paradise: Fifty-year wait from this point.” His mother said he sometimes let his imagination run away with itself, and it certainly did in school if he had a seat by a window, but this was certainly no time to be thinking whether heaven was laid out like a theme park, so Victor shook out his mind like he would a dusty floor mat in his dad’s car and brought his attention back to the reality of the situation.

  “Did you see two men and two young women in a rowboat?” the commander asked an old man, whom Victor assumed to be a local fisherman, seeing as the old man had a casting net and poles in his boat.

  “They were friends of Mrs. Bridges, they were,” the fisherman said. “Borrowed me boat, they did.”

  “Sir,” the commander said, his chiseled face bristling. “They are Tory spies. The men are escaped prisoners.”

  “The devil you say!” the fisherman replied.

  “Which way did they go?” the commander asked.

  “I don’t know for that, sir. I didn’t pay them no never mind as they brought back my boat in ship-shape and Bristol fashion.”

  The commander was flustered, Victor thought. He seemed to be angry as well. He was probably responsible for the prisoners, and two prisoners escaping probably weren’t going to do much for his career track as an officer.

  “You there!” the commander said, pointing at Victor. “I want a word with you.”

  Victor felt a cold shiver run through his body, like the time when he was stopped by a police officer when he was driving through Deland to go to an away school basketball game. It was only a burned out taillight bulb, but fear had coursed through his body until the officer told him what the problem was. He had envisioned being taken off to jail, being the subject of a Cops episode, and the song Bad Boys had come on as if his brain had been a jukebox. “Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you…”

  “Yes, sir?” Victor said, hoping there was no fear in his voice.

  “Did you see four young people, two lads and two wenches?

  “Yes, sir, I believe I did. Two lasses and two lads?” Victor couldn’t refer to Bette and Minerva as “wenches.”

  “Yes, which way did they go?”

  Mrs. Beard whispered to Victor that he should lie. Victor pointed south, in the opposite direction in which his four friends had gone. “Down Front Street that way,” he said.

  “Thank you, citizen.”

  “Are they important, officer?”

  “They are spies, sir. Spies, spies for the tyrant King George. We are going to catch them and hang them,” he said.

  Victor swallowed hard. “Hang them?” He gulped.

  “For escaping,” the commander of the troop said. “Not the wenches of course, we’ll just lash those tarts when we catch them. Attention,” he called to his men, who snapped to attention in two files of six each. “Left face,” he ordered, and when his troops had complied, he said, “At the quick time, forward, march!”

  Victor watched them go. Eighteenth century, Victor, he reminded himself. They had whipping posts, and hanged spies. The British hanged Nathan Hale, who regretted he only had one life to give for his country. If only I had Hale’s courage. “Thanks for the advice, Mrs. Beard,” he said.

  “My pleasure young man, although considering what those boys have done today, a little stretch on the hemp might do them a bit of good.”

  “The commander even threatened to
whip the girls, Mrs. Beard.”

  “Well now, young man. From his point of view the girls did aid two prisoners in an escape.”

  “I think those punishments would be difficult for Mr. Greene to explain to their parents,” Victor said. “What would Mr. Greene say to the parents? Sorry about the lash marks on your daughters, but we were visiting the 18th century and things went a bit whacky. Gee, Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, sorry about your sons. We’ll plant two trees on campus in their memory.” He thought that would be typical at Cassadaga Area High School: the school administration would plant two more trees with those little cheesy fake marble markers to note a deceased student’s passing. They would plant the trees in an area known to the students as The Grove of the Ghosts, the eternal Phantom mascots. Some students believed the ghosts of dead students haunted the hallways of the high school as surely as the ghosts of dead soldiers haunted the Gettysburg Battlefield as Victor had learned from the History Channel. Victor would have to remember to ask the Beards if they knew Bobby Freimuth, a friend of Victor’s who had died the year before of brain cancer. He hoped Bobby wasn’t spending eternity as a ghost on campus. Breakfast Club Hell, he mused.

  “I think we’d better get back to Mr. Greene and tell him what is going on, Mrs. Beard.”

  “Good idea,” Mrs. Beard agreed, “but when we get there I’m going to find Charles. I expect he’s at Carpenter’s Hall in the library again.”

  Victor, looking around to make sure no one was watching him, took a peek at the time on his iPod. 3:57 P.M. They had little more than an hour before the portable classroom reappeared, then only a five-minute window for escape, and a teacher who couldn’t walk.

  Before they were back at the Ross house, Mary Beard floated away in the general direction of Carpenter’s Hall. Victor figured she was going to rekindle the argument with Charles. Inside the Ross house, Betsy was with a customer in the front room and Victor found his colleagues. Mr. Greene was missing, but Bette told Victor the Anderson twins had carried Mr. Greene to an outhouse in the back and were waiting for his call of nature to be relieved.

  “What gives?” Bette asked.

  Victor spoke softly. “You have a dozen soldiers looking for you,” he said.

  “See twins,” Bette scolded her classmates. “You’re in big trouble.”

  “So are you,” Victor said.

  “Me?” Bette replied, shocked. “Why me?”

  “Both of you—Minerva too,” Victor said.

  “Why, Victor?” Minerva asked, anxiety in her voice.

  “For aiding the escape. They plan to whip you and Bette and hang the twins,” Victor added.

  “Hang us!” Justin whined.

  “Keep your voice down, Justin,” Victor cautioned.

  “Boys! I need your help,” Mr. Greene’s echo reverberated in the room. The Andersons went out back to carry their teacher back into the house.

  “Where are the soldiers, Victor?” Minerva asked in a nervous voice.

  “I sent them off in the other direction. That should keep them busy for a bit, until they figure out I lied to them.”

  “Then they’ll be after you too,” Minerva said.

  Victor looked at her and felt his heart race slightly. She was pretty, he thought.

  You don’t have time for that now, Victor, he reminded himself. Don’t even think about kissing her. But the more he told himself not to think of kissing her the more he thought about kissing her. Only the reappearance of Mr. Greene broke the enchantment of Minerva Messinger.

  “Victor, fill me in on what is going on,” Mr. Greene said.

  “There’s a militia patrol looking for the twins and the girls, and now me I guess.”

  Mr. Greene looked concerned. Victor noticed worry lines in his forehead, something old people sometimes had. Mr. Greene was forty, he reminded himself.

  “I sent them off in another direction, Mr. Greene,” Victor said. “They said they were going to whip the girls and hang the twins.”

  Mr. Greene looked at the twins and shook his head. “You boys and I are going to have a little chat when we get back to school,” he said. “Look, kids, we have an hour before the classroom reappears and we’ve got to be there. Remember, it will only stay here for five minutes, maximum. If we don’t catch the classroom, we will be stuck here in 1776.”

  “We’ll miss the Homecoming Dance,” Minerva said.

  Victor looked at Minerva as if she were daft. The other students looked at her as if she had said the stupidest thing in the world. Her face flushed.

  “That was a stupid thing to say,” she admitted.

  “It certainly was, Minerva,” Bette said. “After what we’ve been through today? Gee whiz, girl.”

  “I’m sorry, okay?” Minerva said.

  Mary and Charles floated through the walls of the house and reappeared in the back room with the students and Mr. Greene. Victor was surprised to see them so congenial, transparent arm in transparent arm, smiling at one another like the happy dead couple in the movie Beetlejuice.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Beard, could you float over Philadelphia and see where the militia soldiers are at present?” Mr. Greene said.

  “We can do that for you, Mr. Greene,” Mary Beard replied. “Come, Charlie,” she cooed. “Let’s fly away together.”

  “Yes, my little turtle dove,” Charles replied.

  Victor felt like gagging. He liked the Beards better when they were fighting.

  Chapter 14

  Ten minutes later the Beards returned to the back room of the Ross house with a reconnaissance report. The soldiers had broken into six groups of two militiamen each and were going house to house, south to north, on the numbered streets from 2nd Street to 7th Street, knocking on doors and asking questions of the inhabitants. It would only be a matter of time before they made it up to Arch Street, as most of the militia was either already at Locust Street or Walnut Street, and Walnut Street was only three blocks from Arch Street.

  “Those bayonets look rather sharp,” Mrs. Beard offered, and suddenly Minerva felt fear run through her veins; ever since she was a little girl, when she was frightened she would have to pee. Fear seemed to have a hold on her bladder, and the more she thought about it, the more she had to really go—and she wasn’t sure she could hold it all the way back to the 21st century. She examined her choices: either she used a chamber pot and everyone could hear her tinkle or she could face up to the outhouse and do her business there. She tried in vain not to remember the privy experience at summer camp, but as she walked out to the 18th century outhouse behind the building she could see the flies circling outside the wooden door with the carved crescent moon on its entrance. As she opened the door, the stench made Minerva throw her head back and flap a hand as if to move the smell elsewhere. It was a vain gesture. She had nothing with which to wipe the seat either. An inadvertent glance brought the image of the putrid sump beneath her and she felt as if she were going to regurgitate. She ripped another bit of petticoat and wiped the rim of the wooden seat, then dropped her petticoat and her drawers to do her business. When she was finished, she looked around for toilet paper and saw only a few corncobs. Again, she used a patch of petticoat in lieu of toilet paper. She could never make it in the 18th century, she realized. No way, no how. How did these poor women ever put up with all of this?

  When she returned to her friends, Bette Kromer said, “Minerva, are you alright? You’re as white as a ghost…oh, excuse me, Mrs. Beard.”

  “That’s perfectly fine, dearie,” Mrs. Beard chirped.

  “I don’t think I could live here, Bette. We’ve got to get home. Mr. Greene, what are the corncobs for in the outhouse?” Minerva asked her teacher.

  “18th century toilet paper,” Greene replied.

  “Gross,” Minerva said. She was able to stop herself from visualizing the business usage of the corncobs and said nothing more about her experience. Why was Victor Bridges staring at her like a moonstruck calf? Minerva wondered. Was something showing? Oh, please
, not that, she told herself.

  “Victor?” she asked.

  “Yes, Minerva?” Victor replied.

  “Why were you staring at me?”

  “Hold still,” Bette Kromer said, and smacked a bug from Minerva’s bonnet.

  A cockroach scurried across the wooden floor until Justin’s foot came crunching down on him.

  Cockroaches didn’t bother Minerva; only spiders and mice.

  “Just like home,” Minerva said to her Florida classmates.

  “May I have your attention?” Mr. Greene asked. “I’m going to need a little help with walking. Do you kids think you can appropriate a sedan chair for me?”

  “Sure, Mr. G,” Justin said enthusiastically. “Heath and I can get one for you.”

  “Not on your life, Justin,” Mr. Greene said. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. Victor, why don’t you and Minerva find me a sedan chair? It may take four of you kids to lug me to the field.”

  “Sure, we’ll find one if Mrs. Beard will help,” Victor replied.

  “I’d love to, young man,” said the ghost.

  Mrs. Beard and her husband Charles floated out of the back room through the wall onto and above Arch Street, searching the city for an unused sedan chair. Victor and Minerva followed behind on Arch Street. Suddenly Victor said:

  “Hold my hand, Minerva.”

  Minerva was startled. “Why?”

  “So we don’t look suspicious, but look like a colonial couple out for a walk,” he said.

  She looked at Victor for a moment to gauge his true intention. She didn’t believe his motive; he wanted to hold her hand because he wanted to hold her hand, not because of suspicious Philadelphians. Yet she didn’t say anything. She took the hand he offered and slipped her fingers between his and her heart began to race and her body began to tingle. He breathed deeply and Minerva realized that it had taken Victor quite some time to gather the courage to offer his hand, but she was glad he had asked her. Now what were they trying to find? Her heart was confusing her head, and she didn’t need that at this moment.