by John Farris
“The hologram’s gone,” Devon said. “That can’t be good.”
“For someone,” Harlee said. “Oh, well. She was no business of ours anyway.”
TWO
JUBILATION COUNTY, GEORGIA* • JULY 22, 1926 •
1530 HOURS MOBIUS TIME
Cap’n Hobbs ridin’ here
Black-horse rider
Buckshot in his gun, huh!
Hammers on the Dumas line
Buddy don’t you fall, huh!
Jesus done forgot his longtime man
Oh buddy don’t you fall
Crazy in my head, huh!
Hurtin’ in my soul
Hear that hammer ring, boy
Down in the dark hour’s dream
His name was Jericho Smith.
The others on his chain, the guards around them each broiling day, knew that much about him, but not much more. What they knew best was to leave him alone.
Not that Smith was dangerous or a troublemaker, not one of those hapless convicts on the squad chain who made life even more difficult for themselves with an in-cautious word, a slack work ethic, or a wrong look at a harassing guard, which earned punishment brutal beyond the pains of a long day’s labor with hammers, shovels, pickaxes. There were other Negroes on his chain with powerful frames, but Smith was the tallest, his shoulders wider, his arms more powerful than any of the rest. He set a tireless pace at the track-laying site with his nine-pound hammer while the labor gang’s slow chorus accompanied the spike-driving, steel-ringing strokes. Hammers on the Dumas line.
Smith knew what those words meant, because the straight stretch of railroad track was where he had spent all of his conscious life. The track that came out of the woods half a mile to the west, lying alongside a flat cotton field and a red-dirt road straight as the track itself. He knew west because that was where the sun set every day. He didn’t know where Dumas was. He knew only the horizon and the chain and the eighty dark men he worked with, the narrow road and the dusty cotton field. The birds on the telephone wire and the insects in the dry weeds of the ditch. The same clouds in the same sky, day after day. The heat and sweat and moaning and work. The brutal guards, the man on the black horse who ruled the guards and whose name was Hobbs. A thin man with war wounds crudely layered over, waxen, part of his face wrenched sideways, one eye rigidly pale as ice. Wore jodhpurs and polished brown boots and a campaign hat. Tobacco in one cheek. Smith knew just when Cap’n Hobbs would lean down from the saddle and spit vilely in the dust. All day long. The same times, the same way.
The Dumas line seemed never to get any longer, for all their hard work and track laying. Every day he swung the same hammer at the same spikes in the same place until it was time, sun growing red in the sky, to lay ’em down.
But who was Jesus? he sometimes wondered. And what were those dreams of the dark hour?
It was the dark hour during which he lay down on a thin filthy mattress (know it musta been a bedbug, chinch can’t bite that hard), his head on a pillow covered with an evil-smelling flour sack, the collective sweat and grime of his days, linked to the “building chain” after the prisoners’ evening feed of fried sowbelly, cornpone, and sorghum, their unvarying meal. Lay down as he knew he must but not to sleep. Or if he slept he had no memory of what sleep was like. Close his eyes and open them again to the rousting cry, still dark outside, torches in the prison-camp yard, trucks waiting, pee and eat and go to the squad chain, jolt down another rutted clay road to the Dumas line, wait for a glimmer of light in the east to pick ’em up and go to work.
Smith never spoke to any of the other prisoners during the short ride to the Dumas line or while they rested after the midday feed. Yet he knew all about them without having to ask, just as he knew everything he could want to know about the guards and Hobbs, the black-horse rider. He knew names and knew their crimes, much of them petty although there were men on his chain who had committed rape or murder. He knew secrets and torments. They just came to him, unbidden, like flies to the dried salt on his skin. He knew about sweethearts, children, despair.
What he knew nothing about was himself. Where he had come from, why he was there.
Hobbs leaning down from his saddle to spit, straightening with an angry sweep of his good eye, looking out for the men he would remove from the chain that evening, give them the strop, ten slashes to bare buttocks. Or, if he was in a particularly evil frame of mind, there was the unspeakable torture of the “jack,” a medieval pillory in which prisoners were locked into wooden stocks, then left to hang in midair by their wrists and ankles until they passed out.
The sweat began to sting their eyes by nine in the morning.
Wiping it off here!
Wipe it off.
Smith couldn’t tell time, and of course he had no need to, but he knew exactly at what point in his daily labors the mule wagons would plod by on the road. He knew when the six crows would float down to alight, one at a time, on the sagging telephone line. He knew when, having raised his hammer above his strong shoulders for the hundredth or two hundredth time, he would catch a glimpse of a hawk in full wingspread above the pine woods and marvel at its freedom. He knew when he would shift his eyes and find Cap’n Hobbs looking hard at him, and he knew with that little push he could give things in his mind the captain’s good eye would be made to shift away from him, and there would be no blood-biting lash for Jericho Smith after the day’s work, no pickshack locked to his already-burdened legs, no sweat-box assigned out of idle malice. Bored and ignorant men could turn vicious on a whim.
Yet they all sensed it was wise to leave Smith alone.
The man chained to his immediate right had stolen twelve dollars from a market to feed his children. He had been sentenced to eight years on the chain.
Smith wondered, at a certain time of each day, what his sentence was for, and how long it would last.
The thief had developed a hernia working on the chain. Smith knew exactly when he would sink to his knees, paralyzed from agony, and the guards would come to take him off the chain, cursing him as they loaded him roughly into the back of one of the prison-camp trucks.
Screams.
Jesus done forgot his longtime man.
Smith wondered where the prisoner with the hernia was taken, yet he was always there in the torchlit yard the next day, which was this day, and the day before, waiting patiently to become another link on the chain.
Smith knew how easily he could get off the chain if he wanted to. In that bright corner of his mind where he instinctively Knew Things he had seen himself sever the links just by concentrating for a few seconds. But what was the reason for leaving the chain? Where would he go? Tomorrow, inevitably, he would be back in the yard. They all would, even those who had come from “somewhere.” Towns and homes and families they thought about day-long, their hopes and silent cries for release passing through Smith’s receptive mind.
But he had nowhere to go. Dreams, memories were denied him. The chain—the first and final place—was home, just as tomorrow was today, and today was yesterday. He was there simply to endure.
Oh buddy don’t you fall.
The man with the hernia had been taken away.
Hobbs, scowling, leaned out past his horse to spit chewed tobacco.
And Smith raised his hammer.
As he had done countless times before, as he always would do.
Then he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, something completely unexpected, compelling in its newness. Something different.
He stood there transfixed, arm and shoulder muscles bulging.
Crazy in my head, huh! went the refrain up and down the squad chain.
But, as they grunted huh! in rhythmic expectation of the hammer’s fall, Smith was motionless. Men with hammers and pickaxes faltered and stared at him in stark disbelief.
A taxi had appeared on the road and was slowing opposite the chain gang on the embankment.
Smith couldn’t read and had no concept of what the
words DUMAS TAXI slanting through a yellow shield on a front door of the taxi meant. But in the part of his brain that Knew Things he was aware that this day was meant to be different, with consequences to himself.
The black horse threw back its head, reacting as if a bee had wandered up its nose. Cap’n Hobbs nearly lost his seat.
A back door opened, and a young woman in a summer dress and a wide-brimmed hat stepped out onto the rusty road. She held the crown of the hat to her head because of a sudden breeze and gazed up at the chain gang.
“God damn you, Smith! Starin’ at a white woman there? Nigger, you bring that hammer down!”
Smith.
The young woman smiled, and looked in his direction.
In his mind where he Knew Things, Jericho Smith heard her voice:
You’re Smith? Come on then. We’ve got places to go.
The breeze freshened; red dust blew. Smith laid his hammer down.
Walked away from the shackles and chains that fell from his ankles like paper cutouts.
Shocked silence, punctuated by the cocking of hammers on Cap’n Hobbs’s eight-gauge sawed-off.
Smith glanced at him and the dust rose in a furious cloud and swept Hobbs away from his horse, lifted him twenty feet into the air, while Smith shrugged a biting fly from a sweaty shoulder and walked on down the embankment toward the waiting girl.
He jumped the ditch while most of the men on the gang and the guards watched Hobbs cartwheel through the dirt maelstrom that surrounded him. His horse wheeled and ran. A few of the prisoners were more intrigued by Smith, who had paused to speak to the girl. She gestured to the open door of the taxi.
A boy of fifteen or so with hard-to-comb blond hair and more than a touch of hobgoblin in his face, so ugly he was curiously appealing, looked out of the taxi with a cranky expression, said impatiently, “C’mon, it’s time to go! Leave late, get there late.”
The young woman held out a hand to Jericho Smith.
“I’m Gwen,” she said. “For Guinevere. And the stink-pot’s right. We’d better be going, it took me long enough to find you.”
“Who am I?” Smith said uncertainly.
“Big guy, we’ll talk about it on the way.”
“I have to do somethin’ first.”
Smith turned, looked hard at the long line of prisoners on the railroad embankment and at the brutal guards—who seemed not anxious to fire on him, standing as close as he was to the pretty young woman.
The chain writhed and upended a score of prisoners before flying harmlessly to pieces, freeing them. A few of the men turned to the guards, who lowered their guns and backed away. But the rest of the former prisoners just stared at their feet for several seconds before layin’ them down a final time and scrambling away from the never-to-be-finished Dumas line.
For the first time in his harsh existence Smith felt the unfamiliar tug of facial muscles. He was smiling. In the mind sanctuary where he had always Known Things, recognition stirred as he looked again at Gwen.
“I don’t know who I am,” he said. “But I know who I want to be.”
“And who is that?”
“You will do,” Jericho Smith said.
* Parallel Universe Archival ref. p. 702581-MW (Fresno Vortex series)
1544 HOURS MOBIUS TIME
Patrick, the fifteen-year-old nephew of Mickey the Mechanic, both of whom had last been seen in the vicinity of Paramus, New Jersey, on a chilly October night in 1973, took his eyes off the red-clay road along which he was driving a borrowed taxicab at seventy-plus, and said in a breaking voice to Gwen in the backseat, “It’s HAPpening like you said IT would!”
“Just drive,” she told him, a steely but preoccupied look in her eyes. The recent chain-gang lifer named Smith was in the seat next to her, slumped now, his eyes closed, sweat trails through the dust on his dark beautifully boned face. But even at their speed and with the windows down the odor coming off his scarred work-gang-hardened body and tattered clothing was hard to bear.
Hovering above the straight road a couple of miles behind them a booming blackened tempest was growing in size, lightning bolts hurled earthward as if a petulant god were cleaning house.
“B-b-but it’s getting BIGger.”
“Keep your eyes on the damn road,” Gwen snarled when they came within a foot of plunging into a milkweed-infested ditch on the right side. More soothingly she said, “It’s nothing, trust me. Just a localized backlash from taking Smith off the chain. It won’t follow us into town.”
“B-b-but you said the universe might implode.”
“That was a worst-case scenario, Patrick. And I had a bitch of a headache this morning. The universe didn’t implode when you borrowed this taxi, did it? No.”
“B-b-but does this mean TOMORROW I’ll steal the taxi again and we’ll go out to the Dumas line and—”
“No, it doesn’t, Patrick. I tried to explain to you. There are certain allowable anomalies within a paradox. Tomorrow will be like yesterday for you, the same old yesterday since you and Mick got dumped here. I’ll be gone. When you wake up in the morning you won’t remember that Auntie Gwen was ever here.”
“B-b-b—”
“Patrick. Stop it. Stuttering gets to be a habit. That would not be an allowable anomaly, and you’ll stutter for the rest of your—”
“You said you’d help Uncle Mick and me g-g-get out of here!”
“Keep your eyes,” Gwen reminded him again. The boy’s distress genuinely troubled her. Tears spilling from those red-rimmed blue orbs, smearing all over his freckled runty-endearing face. There is no way out. For you. She swallowed the words. Couldn’t say it. He might drive them smack into a telegraph pole. How much soul-destroying frustration could a fifteen-year-old endure? Maybe tomorrow—or his next yesterday, or whatever you wanted to call Patrick’s Mobius existence within this tab version of Jubilation County, July 23, 1926—he’d take precipitously to serious moonshine like his uncle Mickey had. Certainly an allowable anomaly. But there would be no escaping in a Chevy Nomad with a set of mysteriously enabling spark plugs engineered by a thirty-fourth millennium, before Christ, time tinkerer, who had not been sucked into the Fresno Vortex. At least not on his first jaunt through space/time to modern-era earth, circa 1893.
Even if the Nomad’s power sources hadn’t been exhausted, like the motive powers of all the other erstwhile time machines (towed to and stacked up in the rear acreage of Wick Hooser’s scrapyard on Stinking Weasel Creek), leaving this Jubilation County by mechanical means might not be a permissible anomaly. That could cause an implosion of the universe, and Gwen knew it. But there was no genius around who could rejigger and properly calibrate the flighty Nomad or any other machines invented in planetary habitats scattered around Universal System MW. Their inventors, unsavory specimens of pseudoparenchyma for the most part, had long gone to dust after winding up in the Vortex, done in by what was for them a poisonously inhospitable atmosphere. Just as well, for the sake of the sanity of longtime Jubilationers who were not psychologically equipped to deal with the sight of beings that flitted through piney woods jellylike and luminous as ball lightning, or gaseous slime-balls trudging along their streets. The Vortex had, in the life span of several suns, attracted a few recombinent but reasonably earthlike bipeds of great intellectual and scientific prowess. Unfortunately they, or those, had been incarcerated in the dim third-floor cells of the courthouse and jail, and were largely forgotten by country folk for whom the future was forever today.
Next to Gwen in the backseat of the jouncing taxi, Jericho Smith, with a last flutter of his eyelashes and relaxation of muscles that unfortunately included the sphincter, stopped breathing. His labors were done.
Gwen regarded the handsome but no longer necessary human being with a pang of nostalgia and even a tear; she was a woman after all. But everything that Smith had been extraphysically, Gwen now was. She was perilously close to psychic overload, like a bird of paradise ravaged by a pterodactyl (roughly describing the
transfer of Mordaunt’s feminine soul to its new host), but purest ecstasy of a vibrational intensity known only to gods fallen and unfallen calmed her. Apocatastasis, or restitution of a vital soul, was now in part accomplished. Job well done. (And wouldn’t there be some long faces at the Vatican when this news was passed around the Consistory of the Twelve!) Time to get out of Jubilation County—
“Patrick? Slow down and pull off into the woods.”
“Huh? What’s wrong?” He glanced back again, and his face wrinkled in disgust.
“Yes, I know. I’m afraid poor Smith has left us.”
“You mean he’s d-dead?”
“Oh, Patrick. Help me get him out of the taxi. He’ll be drying up in a few minutes.”
“D-d-d—”
“Dust to dust. But he won’t be needing a grave.”
“Shouldn’t w-we TAKE him to—”
“No, Patrick. And you wouldn’t want to return this taxi you hot-wired with a fresh corpse inside. Even though, of course, tomorrow none of this will have happened.”
Together they wrestled Jericho Smith’s remains out of the taxi and laid him on the shady side of a two-foot-thick pitch-knobby Georgia pine, so old that its later branches were now ninety feet from the ground, like broken rungs of a ladder. Birds flitted through the tall trees. Same old birds, same old tunes. Same old sunshine. Jubilation County was a pleasant enough place to live, but unfortunately Patrick didn’t appreciate his immortality, stuck as he was at an awkward age.
“Should we SAY somethin’?” he wanted to know. His face was flushed, trickling beads of sweat.