Out of Time

by Deborah Truscott

  But finally, simply to expedite things, I gave up and turned.

  “Go slowly,” he ordered, and I did, easing past the hedge at twenty-five miles an hour. When we came abreast of the field I picked up speed again. The Colonel, who had been scrutinizing the hedge (and the embankment as well), slumped back in his seat and closed his eyes.

  “Done?” I asked.

  He shook his head, eyes still closed. “Drive on a mile or two. Incidentally, is that the proper word? One drives a carriage. Does one drive an automobile? Or sail it like a ship?”

  “One drives an automobile,” I said, emulating his speech. “But it’s entirely possible to go sailing down the road.”

  The Colonel opened an eye and glanced at me.

  “What is it you want to see?” I asked. “And then, when we’ve seen it, can we turn around and head the other way?”

  “After that, yes.”

  This time I glanced at the Colonel, who was now staring fixedly at the road ahead of us. His face was drawn and pale and I noticed that his hands gripped the sides of his seat. He looked, in fact, a trifle seasick.

  “I remember some of these buildings,” he said suddenly.

  “I expect you would. Many of them predate the Revolution.”

  “Revolution,” the Colonel muttered, snorting over the word. And then he pointed to a two-story brick house with dark green shutters facing the road on my left. “There!” he said, practically leaning across me. “Turn in there.”

  It was too late to turn. We drove (sailed) past, and I turned around in the parking lot of another old house that, judging from the sign in front, now housed a law firm. A minute later we cruised past the brick house that intrigued the Colonel.

  “That’s it!” he cried. “You’ve got to stop!”

  I did the next best thing. I made a hard turn into a narrow residential lane that ran alongside the house, and slowed to a crawl.

  “What’s so special about this house?”

  “It’s a tavern,” he said. “I left Peter Finch and the others there.”

  Of course! Good old Peter!

  “Who’s Peter Finch?” I asked.

  “Major Finch, actually. A friend of mine. He and … ah … a group of us rode out from Philadelphia yester — I mean, that morning. I left them here to dine and went on a little way. I was…I believe I was to come back for them shortly.”

  By this time I had driven past the house and turned around. Now I pulled over as far as possible on the narrow shoulder and came to a complete stop, the car facing the side and rear of house. I felt like we were on some sort of bizarre stakeout.

  “That was a memory,” I pointed out. “That Major Finch detail.”

  “Not enough of one, I’m afraid.”

  “You didn’t stay with them?” I asked. “The major and the others?”

  “No.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “No. I had something on my mind. Peter was in high spirits and I was…I was not. I left them and went on. I needed to think about something.”

  “Think about what?”

  “I can’t recall,” he said, and I believed him. He looked at me and shook his head in bafflement. “I tumbled into your time with nary a scratch, but my memory is blasted full of holes.”

  “But you wanted me to drive out here. You hadn’t remembered Peter until you saw the house, so there must have been another reason—”

  “I think I was looking for something.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m not sure. I had a…” he stopped and tried again. “Have you ever had an elusive thought? A fragment of memory? Something that nagged at the corner of your mind but you just couldn’t quite…”

  “Put your finger on?” I suggested.

  “Everything I did up to the moment I sat on that damned wall seems fragmented. I can’t remember how I know Peter. I can’t remember—” The Colonel looked at me in wonder. “I can’t even remember how the bloody hell I got to Philadelphia.”

  “You remembered White Plains and Brandywine,” I pointed out.

  “I remember…certain strategies,” he said slowly, shaking his head. “My God, there are so many holes.”

  “You’ve remembered knowing your friend Peter,” I said. “You’ve remembered leaving him at this house—”

  “Tavern—”

  “And you’ll remember the rest, eventually.”

  “I devoutly hope so.”

  I glanced at the Colonel who was busy studying the rear of the house. “You know,” I ventured, “three weeks after Germantown this entire area must have been peppered with American soldiers thrown back from Philadelphia—”

  “Rebels—”

  “What?”

  “Rebels thrown back from Philadelphia—”

  I closed my eyes and prayed for patience. “Whatever,” I said finally. “But the question is, what were you doing on Skippack Pike in the first place?”

  The Colonel shook his head. “I wish to God I knew.”

  “Maybe you were scoping out the enemy,” I suggested, trying to jog his memory.

  “Scoping?” The Colonel tested the word. “Possibly,” he conceded. “But not officially.”

  “Why not?”

  “The composition of our party, for one thing. Too many officers and not enough men.” He shrugged. “It was an activity, I think, born out of simple boredom.”

  “Another memory,” I pointed out encouragingly. “The officers-to-men ratio.” For a moment I imagined a small group of Redcoats weaving their way unnoticed around clumps of armed and hostile Patriots. “But if that’s what you did,” I went on, “then it was very foolish.”

  “If that’s what we did, then it was,” he agreed mildly, and turned his attention back to the house. “We’ve got to go in,” he said.

  “We can’t. It’s a private residence. We can’t just knock on the door and say, “Excuse me—”

  “Of course we can.” He glared at me. “It’s a tavern. I was just there yesterday!”

  “You were there over two centuries ago,” I countered, my voice rising to match his. “It’s somebody’s house now!”

  At that precise moment we heard a door slam. Both of us snapped our heads toward the house and saw a woman with two young children emerging from a small back porch. The woman herded the children down the walk toward a car about the size of mine, the cheerful sound of their voices floating toward us.

  “A house,” I repeated quietly. “A family lives there.”

  “They could be patrons,” he said.

  “They’re not.”

  But he knew that. Wearily, he tipped his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. “None of this seems real,” he said.

  I could hear his breathing, see the subtle rise and fall of his chest. He was freshly shaven but his face was shadowed with fatigue, its fine planes meeting in hollow pools beneath his cheekbones, at his temples and around his eyes. Just below the corner of his jaw I saw the beat of his pulse. Or perhaps I imagined that. But when I touched his arm his flesh was warm against my fingers.

  Everything was real, including him.

  “We need to go,” I said.

  Chapter 12

  I pulled back out onto Skippack Pike, retracing our route past Uncle Bennett’s toward Route 202, which would, eventually, take us to Wilmington, Delaware. Before we reached the intersection I looked over at the Colonel and saw that his face was absolutely white.

  “Are you all right?”

  There was a long pause. Finally I heard him draw a ragged breath. “I assume one gets accustomed to this. Eventually.”

  “We could stop and get some Dramamine,” I offered.

  “Dramamine,” he repeated, an unspoken question.

  “Seasick medicine.”

  “This isn’t seasickness. I’ve crossed an ocean. I know what seasickness is.”

  “So you’ve remembered something else,” I pointed out cheerily. “An ocean voyage.”

  I felt him shift in his seat and glanc
ed over to see him staring at me. “I don’t really recall,” he said thoughtfully. “I just know I’ve spent time aboard ship.”

  “Of course you did. How else could you get to Philadelphia from England? Airplanes weren’t invented yet.”

  “Airplanes?”

  “Never mind.” I shook my head. “Let’s talk about ocean voyages.”

  The Colonel closed his eyes. “You are right, of course. I crossed the Atlantic to get here. In fact, I’ve sailed several times — long voyages. I have no idea, not a clue, how I know that.”

  “Long voyages to where? Other than here, I mean.”

  He shot me a patience-wearing-thin glance.

  “Right,” I said. “No clue, et cetera.” I waited a long second then added, “So, if it’s not seasickness, what is it?”

  “The speed. I feel like I’ve been shot out of a canon. I can’t bear to watch the landscape.” He paused. “Distract me. Tell me about airplanes.”

  So I did, starting with Kitty Hawk (just up the road, more or less, from Lila’s cottage) and continuing through the moon landing, space stations, and the exploration of Mars. Meanwhile, we left Norristown behind and pushed on toward Wilmington.

  “You’ve been in such things?” he asked.

  “Some of them.” I explained about astronauts and tourists, described the interior of a passenger jet, and recounted details of my flight (one college summer) to London.

  “Where else in England did you go?” he asked.

  “The Lakes District, Canterbury, Stonehenge, Bath,” I recited.

  “I grew up in Kent.”

  Instantly, our eyes met.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned away.

  “Canterbury’s in Kent—”

  “Ah, how relieved am I to know that,” the Colonel interrupted with sarcasm. “At least whole cities have not removed themselves elsewhere in these interesting new times.”

  I counted to ten. “What I mean is, would Canterbury hold any memories for you, any triggers—”

  “How can I possibly know that, Mrs. Finlay?” He bit off each word in hard accents, spelling it out for the slow learners in the crowd.

  Yes. Of course. Good point.

  Somewhere between Paoli and West Chester I stopped at a little roadside restaurant, bought some subs and carried them back to the car where the Colonel waited, his attention riveted on people entering and exiting the building, climbing in and out of cars. A mile further on we stopped at a Texaco station. This time the Colonel got out and watched me pump gas, after which I explained the meaning of “rest room” and pointed him in the right direction. Then I paid for the gas and began dropping quarters into a Coke machine. The Colonel had emerged from the men’s room and stood beside me in silent fascination. Wordlessly, I handed him the last two quarters and waited while he inserted the coins as he had seen me do. “Clever,” he mused as the Coke emerged from the machine. “The coins trip a lever that releases the little metal keg.”

  “Can,” I supplied. “And yes, your coin-and-lever hypothesis sounds right.”

  “Of course it’s right. Your machine is rather similar to dispensing mechanisms one finds in Bath. Only in that case the coin releases a flow of spring water into a metal cup the patron holds beneath the spigot.”

  He paused thoughtfully before adding, “Another memory, though wholly unconnected to any other.”

  “You don’t recall what you were doing in Bath?”

  “Pleasure bent, I expect, but I cannot recall when nor with whom.”

  I held out the soft drinks we bought and the Colonel obliging carried them to the car. I had a small styrofoam cooler in the trunk which I retrieved and held out, waiting for him to drop in the cans. He fingered the styrofoam, intrigued.

  “What is it made of?”

  “Petroleum,” I told him, and explained that it kept things both hot and cold. Then I herded him into the car and put the cooler on the back seat. A minute later we were back on 202.

  “I’ve been noticing your population,” the Colonel remarked suddenly.

  I glanced at him with interest. “I imagine we must seem very … different.”

  “Healthy, washed and well-fed,” he said briskly. “I’ve seen no lame, no halt, no ragged children. I’ve seen no obvious hunger and little dirt.”

  I imagined the disease, starvation and filth that were common to his time.

  “And in some respects,” he went on, “yours is an attractive population. Even if they do persist in walking about in their small clothes.”

  “Their what?”

  “Linen. Their undergarments.”

  “Underwear,” I said, and thought of people in shorts and t-shirts. “Yes. I suppose it would seem that way.”

  “How often will we stop?” the Colonel asked me next.

  I shrugged. “Every couple of hundred miles or so.”

  “How does that translate into hours?”

  “On good roads, three or four.”

  “It’s unimaginable. On my side it would take sometimes a week to go that far by coach. Perhaps half as long on a good horse.”

  By this time I had begun to relax a little. We were well on our way to Avon, leaving our skulking intruder — imagined or otherwise — far behind us. Lila was (so far) cooperative and unsuspicious, the children were happy, and it was a sure bet Cameron wouldn’t care where I was, with whom, or when I planned to return. By tomorrow he’d check in with Lila and then lay low before it occurred to her to give him the kids. Not that she would, but he didn’t know that. Cameron went to any lengths to avoid dealing with the children.

  All at once I was hungry. Discovering the Colonel in my garden shed had pretty much killed my appetite until I smelled the subs in the back seat marinating in their vinegar and oil. The Colonel fished two sandwiches from the bag, carefully unwrapping one for me so I could eat as I drove. Then he retrieved drinks from the cooler and, using one hand, I showed him how to open them.

  “Champagne!” he said, startled by the carbonation.

  “Diet Coke,” I told him.

  We crossed the state line and came into Wilmington. It is not a big city but it was the largest American city — of this century, anyway — that the Colonel had seen, and from the tail of my eye I saw his gaze sweep back and forth, taking in buildings and roadways. But before he could launch his usual barrage of questions (population, size, commerce) which I probably couldn’t answer anyway, we merged onto Interstate 95, whose onslaught of overpasses and high-speed traffic hit him with all the breath-robbing intensity of a mammoth amusement park ride.

  When I glanced over I saw his right hand grip the door handle, knuckles white. Minutes later, as we left Wilmington behind, the interstate opened up into a smooth ribbon of uncluttered highway.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Somewhat.” He loosened his deathgrip on the door. And then, a few miles further on, he saw the first of several planes overhead.

  Suddenly, he was filled with delight. Somewhere in the glove compartment he found — at my direction — a road map (another astonishment: the scope and detail of our maps), and entertained himself for several miles tracing our route, seeing where we had been and where we were going. When we zipped through the interchanges at Baltimore his eyes were open and his color was reasonably good. And then his attention was diverted by the Baltimore Harbor, which sprawled in a mammoth tangle of shipyards, rail yards, giant loading cranes, thousand foot barges and quarter-mile piers.

  He looked at me in amazement, awed by the rawness and power of the city.

  “There are places on the Thames just like this,” I told him.

  He began computing the distance to Washington, thrusting his map into my line of vision so I could indicate our route. He matched up road signs with map points, astounded by the accuracy, and then added up the miles between Washington and Richmond. After he explored the map he discovered the car radio — the word “radio,” he informed me, was pro
bably from the Latin radius, meaning rod. I showed him the seek button and for the next several miles everything from Beethoven to the Moody Blues spilled from the speakers like shards of broken glass.

  “How does it work?” he asked. He meant radio in general, not the seek button.

  There was a long silence while I thought. “Sound at one point is converted into electromagnetic waves and transmitted to a receiver at another point,” I ventured finally.

  “So your radio is actually a receiver, then.”

  “Yes, a receiver.” I tried to sound confident.

  “And how do they convert the sound into…”

  “Electromagnetic waves?”

  “Yes. How is that done?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How is it transmitted, then?” the Colonel asked me.

  “I don’t know that either.” Truth was, I wasn’t sure of anything. What are electromagnetic waves, anyway? What are frequency bands? Why do radio stations always have those odd little channel numbers, like 99 point 3 or 104 point 1?

  “It’s interesting,” he said, eyeing me, “how little you seem to know about the mechanics of your century.”

  I tried not to let his remark annoy me. “Thomas Jefferson was the last Renaissance man,” I said, remembering I had read that somewhere. “After that there was just so much, an explosion of technology. No one knows it all.”

  “Jefferson,” the Colonel harrumphed. He leaned forward and pushed the seek button until it yielded up something Baroque — Vivaldi, I think, who was probably dead by the Revolution.

  “The Four Seasons,” he announced, identifying the piece. “Amazing. Absolutely amazing.”

  *****

  Washington was less dramatic than Baltimore. We saw no harbors, no signs of industry, not even a view of the city. We simply crossed the Potomac on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and suddenly we were in Virginia, the Colonel monitoring our progress on his map. Then, on impulse, I exited the interstate and found our way into Alexandria’s Old Town, driving up and down the ancient streets through block after block of eighteenth and early nineteenth century rowhouses.

  “Frozen,” the Colonel said in wonderment. “Frozen in time as in amber.” It wasn’t, of course. Twenty-first century cars were parked at eighteenth century curbs. Twenty-first century people entered and exited eighteenth century doors.