Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  Matthew P. Mayo

  It happened so long ago I mostly have forgotten the why, let alone the how or the who.

  Or maybe it happened today.

  I don’t really know. But I’ll tell you what, I can’t for a second forget that I’m not where I’m supposed to be. Every minute of the day I feel as though I’ve been caught shuffling along the main street of some dusty little poke of a town with my drawers down around my boots, horses flicking their ears and swishing their tails, and me with my whatsit wagging, and up on the boardwalk there are mothers grabbing their kids’ faces and pulling them into shops and here comes the sheriff again . . .

  Or at least that’s what it’s like until I wake up. And every time I wake up I’m in some louse-crawly bed by some busted-pane window overlooking that same dusty main street. And on the floor is a cracked porcelain thunder pot, crawling with flies and stinking.

  I drop back to the shuck pillow and sigh. I’ve been here so many times before. The here is always this town—today’s town, yesterday’s town, tomorrow’s town, all the same. You see, from day to day I can’t recall much of anything. The only thing I really have are slugs of memories that seem solid, waiting for me to build on. But once my attention settles on ’em, they’re gone. So really, I have nothing.

  I started trying to figure it out by keeping a diary. Thought I’d write in it every day, that was the idea. I must have bought it in the mercantile. Actually, I may have bought it this morning. I can’t be sure. Anyway, I figured I’d finally licked it, knew just what needed doing then, and that I’d be able to find my way home—wherever that was. So I jotted down what I know: It is high summer, mid-July, 1871, Territory of Colorado, town of Lodestone.

  But the next day, might have been this morning, the pages and pages I’d written about that day were gone, all those words and thoughts and pencil scratches—gone. The pages were clean like there never were words there. The only thing I had was the memory of having spent all that time writing in the damn diary to begin with, and even that was fuzzy, as if I’d been on a three-day spree. Which makes me wonder if I only think I remember writing it all down. You see how it is with me? Don’t know if I’m coming, going, or if I’m anywhere at all.

  I don’t think that people actually recognize me from any previous visits, but I do think they sense that something’s off about me. Like the smell of a dog when he walks in and settles down by your chair. Somehow you just know that rascal’s been up to something. Then you find out he was seen carryin’ off your neighbor’s prize hen.

  But it’s more than a fresh-blood smell, it’s that feeling of wrongness rising off the little savage like a bad idea. That’s what I think folks sense off me. And I can tell they feel that way even though I’ve been in town but a few hours. Hell, sometimes it’s only a matter of minutes before I get the looks. That’s when I think I might be better off alone.

  Each morning I vow to saddle up and set off early for the hills to do some prospecting, some fishing in the streams, but somehow the day always gets away from me and I never quite make it out of town. I’ll wake up the next morning and I’m right back in a nasty ol’ shuck bed. And that’s the way it’s been for as long as I can remember—which admittedly ain’t too far back.

  At least the name I have sticks with me, probably because it’s an easy thing to pull from one day to the next. It’s not my real name, of course, I know that much. I can’t remember the real one, but this one’ll do. I chose it because of the two letters someone sewed onto each piece of clothing I’m wearing. Inside the shank of each boot, in the collars of my shirt and vest, in the waist of my trousers, the beat and battered topper I wear on my head, someone embroidered a “T. S.” on everything. Wasn’t me who did it, because I can’t sew worth a bean and these letters look like they were done by a professional.

  A Chinese laundryman asked me my name once when I’d had my duds laundered in some little mining town that, come to think on it, looked a lot like this town. Couldn’t have been that long ago because I still remember it. Maybe it was today, just after breakfast. Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, the laundryman.

  He’d tapped the black initials on the shirt with a fingertip, his finger going up and down like a little bird pecking for information. First thing I know I said, “Tim Shaw. Mr. Tim Shaw,” and that’s who I’ve been since, Tim Shaw. I say it fast and it feels right somehow, like it means something, and that one day the meaning’ll come to me. So I’ve been dragging that name with me from day to day like an old satchel I can’t open, but with something I know is good inside.

  Sometimes when I’m telling it to a riled-up sheriff or a livery owner or a saloon floozie, I know for certain it’s not my name. I get a feeling, like when I bite a fresh apple and it’s crisp and the tang of it sets off a memory. Same thing happened to me earlier today, with a beef stew and four plump dumplings bubbling at the mercantile.

  “Oh, but don’t that smell good,” I said to the old lady counting out scoops of coarse meal into cloth sacks.

  She stopped long enough to measure me up and down over those little nose glasses of hers. “It’s my husband’s dinner.”

  I’m afraid I took another peek into the pot. I couldn’t help it, sitting as it was right there in the middle of the little store, on top of the potbelly stove. The dumplings were even taking on that sheen, like sweat on a pretty girl’s face when she’s been asked to dance by every lad in town and she hasn’t said no all evening. I tell you that stew was a sight.

  “Oh, all right.” The old lady’s voice startled me.

  I looked up from staring at the heavenly stew, and I felt my face go red like a struck thumb. “Ma’am?”

  “The stew.” She’d come out from behind the counter with a bowl, a spoon, and a ladle. “Worth two-bits to you?”

  “Why, yes ma’am. But your husband . . .”

  She’d already plunged in the ladle and lifted out two of the most heavenly dumplings oozing underneath with dark gravy. I even saw a nub or two of carrot poking up.

  “He’s always late anyhow. And I’ve et.”

  I barely heard her. By the time the warm, butter-strong scent reached my nose I had my coin purse in my palm and had pinched out more than what she’d asked. And let me tell you it was worth it at twice the price. Ten times . . . because it helped me remember something.

  While I was eating that stew I recalled something important. What the stew had to do with it, I’ve no idea. But I’ve thought on it all day, and now that it is night and I expect I’ll fade off into sleep or whatever it is that I do, I’ll lose the memory by tomorrow. Or maybe tomorrow will be a little bit more of today. Maybe I’ll have a two-day run of it this time. Or a week. And that’s what keeps getting me out of bed. What if this time it all lasts? What if a memory sticks and I’m allowed to live instead of just exist?

  So, what I remembered was this: a woman’s arm—the wrist and hand with a dusting of lightish honey-colored red hair, a slice of sunlight laid across it prettier than if she’d draped a diamond bracelet on there. I could tell it was a woman’s wrist because of that soft knob of bone that’s visible even on a chunky girl and that ain’t never the same on a man, no sir. But this girl was slender. And just above that prettiest of sights, a white sleeve ended, not tight and wrapped in frills or lace, but looser like a coat.

  I took another spoonful of stew, so hot it burned my tongue and I didn’t care, didn’t even stop, afraid that it might break the spell and I’d lose that sliver of a memory. It wasn’t so much the picture in my mind of the hand, the wrist, the sleeve end, but the feeling behind it. You see, I knew that woman. I’m sure of it. Not like you’ll come to know a soiled dove for a few minutes, and not like you come to know your own mother or sister or wife. But somehow I knew who she was, just the same. I guess it was a feeling of familiarity that I was so excited about because nothing has seemed so familiar for such a long time. If it did, I don’t recall it anymore.

  So I kept my eyes closed and stood righ
t there in the little store and slurped on that stew like it was life-giving nectar from that first garden in the Bible. While I was giving thought to that wrist and coat cuff, I ever so gently nudged my mind’s eyes to wander up that sleeve, not tight on the arm like a dress might be, but more like a coat. And then there was a shoulder. I held the spoon in my mouth, the vision I was having just kept going . . . and with no warning at all, I saw a face, the face of a woman, hair shortish, tucked around an ear, and spectacles, too. Big ones the likes of which I’ve never seen, and rimmed in thick, clear frames.

  Her hair was reddish brown, darker than the light hair on her wrist. And I could see an earring, small and glinting like it was a jewel. And her face was precious, easily the prettiest woman who has ever lived, more of the fine light hairs there on her cheek. She held still, like a painting. And then two things happened at once.

  That old woman who’d served me squawked like an early-morning crow will do outside your window, and the pretty woman in my mind cut her eyes in my direction and almost smiled.

  “Are you having a fit? Cause if’n you are, then you can get out of here and right quick, too. I don’t hold with anyone who can’t keep control of himself.”

  I ignored the old stick of a woman for as long as I could, and tried to keep the vision there before me. The pretty woman in my mind had moved, had looked right at me. That never happened before. Or at least not recently. But what’s more, I saw a flash of gold from down lower on her, like a brooch, maybe. But no, it wasn’t at the throat, lovely as that was. It was lower, and to the side. A pin of some sort? No. And the white garment itself was not right, not like something a woman would wear. Nor were the spectacles. But what was it that I missed? There was something else, I just know it. The gold thing down below. I—

  “That’s it. I knew you were a madman the second I clapped eyes on you. Get out of my store right now! Right now before I call for the sheriff!”

  I opened my eyes, the spoon still clamped in my teeth. But the pretty woman was gone, replaced by the shouting old biddy in the store. I set the bowl of warm stew on the counter with the spoon beside it. The dumplings stared at me like the pasty cheeks of a dead child. I wasn’t hungry anymore. Just tired. I walked out of the shop, the old woman’s voice following me until the door cut it off.

  I made my way along the boardwalk for a minute, watched by a few folks. I didn’t care. I had too much to think about to pay them any heed. Then I walked straight into a chunky bald man in arm garters and a striped shirt. He was sweeping his precious few feet of boardwalk.

  “Hey, mister.” He stared at me like I’d said boo in church. “Look out where you’re headed.”

  Not even possible, friend, I thought. “Sorry,” I said.

  “I’ll forget it—if you need a haircut or a bit of doctoring . . .”

  “What?”

  The man shook his head and stepped back inside his shop. “Nothing. I was trying to drum up business. I ain’t had coin enough for a drink all week.”

  I stared at him for a moment, the last of the haziness of the stew-dream leaving me. “Did you say you’re a doctor?”

  “Close as you’ll find around these parts. I’ve even studied back east. Course, out here a man can’t do just one thing. That’s why I also cut hair, pull teeth, clean ears, and lend a hand at the Gazette.”

  I stepped into the empty shop after him and pulled off my hat. “I can use a haircut.”

  “Hell, for a dime I’ll cut ’em all.” He laughed way too long at his own joke. I tried to join in.

  “Have a seat,” he said, and waved me into the chair, talking the entire time.

  I only half heard him. My mind was still on that woman in my memory. On her coat and the thing I didn’t see but I know was there. I closed my eyes while he snipped and fiddled with my hair. I could have cared less what he did with it. Vain I’m not.

  “Doc . . .”

  The man stopped snipping for a second and cleared his throat. I reckon he felt flattered to be called that. “In your professional training, have you ever had any experience working with people who were, well . . . off their nut?” I tapped my head and squinted at him in the reflection before me.

  He lowered the scissors and comb and looked at me in the mirror. “What?”

  “You know—am I crazy?”

  “Mister,” he said, resuming my haircut. “If you’re crazy, then you’d do well to keep it to yourself. People around here don’t much like anything that’s different.”

  Outside, a mule skinner’s wagon raised a fresh cloud of dust as it rumbled past. The doc reached out with one leg and toed his door shut. He went back to work on my hair.

  I sighed. This way I live feels normal to me because it’s been going on for so long. Or has it? I guess I’m either full-bore crazy or not at all. I choose to think I’m not. Small comfort. It’s as if I’ve been forgotten. I bet that the woman in the memory could tell me everything I wish I knew. I didn’t know much about her, but I couldn’t get rid of her, either. She was lodged in my gizzard like a hunk of cheap steak that I can’t swallow or bring back up. Stuck, that’s what she is, and me, too.

  “There. Never have I seen such a fine tonsorial treatment.” The doc stood behind me, hands resting on his girthy middle, looking at my head in the mirror the way a farmer might a prize cabbage. I pushed up out of the chair and rummaged in my vest pocket for money. Then something in the corner, hanging from a peg, caught my eye. I tossed the coins on the little counter and snatched the thing down. It was a white coat.

  “What’s this?” I said, stretching out the sleeves and admiring it as if it were the latest fashion I might like to buy.

  “That’s my doctorin’ coat. We all got one when we graduated from the Kingsley Medical Program in Providence, Rhode Island.”

  “You ever known any women doctors?”

  He snorted a laugh that tailed off like a sneeze. “Mister, you are off your rocker.” He took the coat from me and draped it over his arm, smoothed it.

  “There wasn’t anything there.” I nodded at the coat and pointed to the side of my own chest. “On the coat, I mean.”

  “What would you expect to see? A badge? I’m a doctor, not a lawman.”

  But that was all I heard. I think he kept talking, and I know he called for the sheriff, because a few minutes later a man with a star marched me down the street, prodding me with his pistol and telling me he didn’t have time for troublemakers in his town. I didn’t care much. As long as the cell was empty it would give me the time I needed to think. And time was the one thing I guess I had more of than anything else. Besides, they could hold me there overnight but I wouldn’t wake up there, that much I knew.

  The door squawked and clanked shut behind me and I made my way to the bunk. No one was in the cell with me. I leaned back against the log wall and concentrated on the woman in the white coat.

  Then I had a thought: what if I’ve been doing the same thing forever? What if this is all there is or ever will be to my life? What if I’m being forced somehow to be the same person doing the same things, thinking the same thoughts, over and over, and a thousand more overs besides?

  It’s as if I’m caught in something that keeps spinning and can’t stop. And the worst of it is that I have a strong hunch that it never will stop. Like a pup that’s caught his tail and keeps on spinning with that thing in his teeth. Except even dogs will grow bored and chase a rabbit instead. That’s what bothers me the most—knowing that if I can’t ever gain an edge on this thing, I won’t ever grow older, and that means I won’t ever die. And I guess that even writing in my little diary won’t help me because whatever I write, whatever I learn, will all disappear come tomorrow, and I’ll be back where I am right now.

  All of that is truly bad, worse than a main-street showdown with a sore loser at five card stud, because at least with him you stand a chance of dyin’. And wouldn’t that be a blessed relief. But I don’t believe I’m quite there yet. There’s still some fi
guring left to do on this problem.

  No, the worst part is that the only thing that keeps me doing this day after day after day, for what could well be thousands or by now millions of years (or is it just one day so far?) is that I still have hope. But what if hope should leave me? I guess then I could kill myself. I snapped my eyes open and sat up again, my knuckles pushing into the rough blanket. But what if I come to find out that death is not even possible?

  The cell’s grown darker now; the deputy is snoring lightly in the front room. Soon it will be night and I’ll drift off, and then wake up in a hotel in an uncomfortable shuck bed with a lumpy pillow, a thunder pot on the floor beside my flopped boots. It ain’t much, but it’s something, I reckon.

  I stretch out full length on the plank cot and try to relax. Before too long I think of the woman in the coat, the woman with short red-brown hair, big glasses, and the gold name tag on her chest that reads: DR. JENNIFER KAPLAN, with TIMESHARES in smaller letters underneath.

  I almost open my eyes to . . . do what? Write it down in the diary? Has that ever done any good? I relax and watch her face, and even as she speaks I seem to recall what it is she’s telling me. So much information to remember, I think to myself, right before I am once again lost in her words. Once again.

  Her smile stretches wide and she says, “No sir, Mr. Barr, there’s no need to worry. I can assure you everything has been repaired and tested, and it’s perfectly safe now. You’ll have the ideal trip.” She looks me up and down, leans closer, and says, in a whisper, “You look just like a real cowboy.” She winks, the smile again, then louder, “This journey to the Old West will be the trip of a lifetime for you, Mr. Barr. You’ll wish you never have to leave. Timeshares guarantees it. Now just relax while we perform our last minute checks.”

  Her face disappears, a steel door clunks shut, the bright ceiling lights dim. I can just make out faces staring at me through a glass window set into the wall by the door. She is there, standing beside others, a man and a woman, also in white coats. Above the table where I’m strapped down there are metal rods pulsing with lights, others tipped with points, cables and wire coiled all around me. Everything in here seems to be making a sound, each piece rising to a pitch all its own, then something buzzes, lights on the wall above the window flash from red to green. She is still smiling. Then something explodes.