Was I willing to go back down those stairs and stay for four-plus years? Basically take up residence? Come back two minutes later… only in my forties, with strands of gray starting to show up in my hair? I couldn’t imagine doing that, but I couldn’t imagine what Al had found so important back there in the first place. The one thing I did know was that four or six or eight years of my life was too much to ask, even for a dying man.
I still had over two hours before I was scheduled to show up at Al’s. I decided I’d go back home, make myself another meal, and this time force myself to eat it. After that, I’d take another shot at finishing my honors essays. I might be one of the very few people who had ever traveled back in time—for that matter, Al andI might be the only ones who had ever done it in the history of the world—but my poetry students were still going to want their final grades.
I hadn’t had the radio on when I drove to town, but I turned it on now. Like my TV, it gets its programming from computer-driven space voyagers that go whirling around the earth at a height of twenty-two thousand miles, an idea that surely would have been greeted with wide-eyed wonder (but probably not outright disbelief) by the teenager Frank Anicetti had been back in the day. I tuned to the Sixties on Six and caught Danny & the Juniors working out on “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”—three or four urgent, harmonic voices singing over a jackhammer piano. They were followed by Little Richard screaming “Lucille” at the top of his lungs, and then Ernie K-Doe more or less moaning “Mother-in-Law”:She thinks her advice is a contribution, but if she would leave that would be the solution.It all sounded as fresh and sweet as the oranges Mrs. Symonds and her friends had been picking over that early afternoon.
It soundednew.
Did I want to spend years in the past? No. But Ididwant to go back. If only to hear how Little Richard sounded when he was still top of the pops. Or get on a Trans World Airlines plane without having to take off my shoes, submit to a full-body scan, and go through a metal detector.
And I wanted another root beer.
CHAPTER 3
1
The gnome did indeed have a flag, but not an American one. Not even the Maine flag with the moose on it. The one the gnome was holding had a vertical blue stripe and two fat horizontal stripes, the top one white and the bottom one red. It also had a single star. I gave the gnome a pat on his pointy hat as I went past and mounted the front steps of Al’s little house on Vining Street, thinking about an amusing song by Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Screw You, We’re from Texas.”
The door opened before I could ring the bell. Al was wearing a bathrobe over pajamas, and his newly white hair was in corkscrew tangles—a serious case of bedhead if I’d ever seen one. But the sleep (and the painkillers, of course) had done him some good. He still looked sick, but the lines around his mouth weren’t so deep and his gait, as he led me down the short stub of a hall and into his living room, seemed surer. He was no longer pressing his right hand into his left armpit, as if trying to hold himself together.
“Look a little more like my old self, do I?” he asked in his gravelly voice as he sat down in the easy chair in front of the TV. Only he didn’t really sit, just kind of positioned himself and dropped.
“You do. What have the doctors told you?”
“The one I saw in Portland says there’s no hope, not even with chemo and radiation. Exactly what the doc I saw in Dallas said.In 1962, that was. Nice to think some things don’t change, don’t you think?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Sometimes there’s nothing to say. Sometimes you’re just stumped.
“No sense beating around the bush about it,” he said. “I know death’s embarrassing to folks, especially when the one dying has nothing but his own bad habits to blame, but I can’t waste time being delicate. I’ll be in the hospital soon enough, if for no other reason than I won’t be able to get back and forth to the bathroom on my own. I’ll be damned if I’ll sit around coughing my brains out and hip deep in my own shit.”
“What happens to the diner?”
“The diner’s finished, buddy. Even if I was healthy as a horse, it would be gone by the end of this month. You know I always just rented that space, don’t you?”
I didn’t, but it made sense. Although Worumbo was still called Worumbo, it was now your basic trendy shopping center, so that meant Al had been paying rent to some corporation.
“My lease is up for renewal, and Mill Associates wants that space to put in something called—you’re going to love this—an L.L. Bean Express. Besides, they say my little Aluminaire’s an eyesore.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I said, and with such genuine indignation that Al chuckled. The chuckles tried to morph into a coughing fit and he stifled them. Here in the privacy of his own home, he wasn’t using tissues, handkerchiefs, or napkins to deal with that cough; there was a box of maxi pads on the table beside his chair. My eyes kept straying to them. I’d urge them away, perhaps to look at the photo on the wall of Al with his arm around a good-looking woman, then find them straying back. Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble.
“Thanks for saying that, buddy. We could have a drink on it. My alcohol days are over, but there’s iced tea in the fridge. Maybe you’d do the honors.”
2
He used sturdy generic glassware at the restaurant, but the pitcher holding the iced tea looked like Waterford to me. A whole lemon bobbed placidly on top, the skin cut to let the flavor seep out. I choked a couple of glasses with ice, poured, and went back into the living room. Al took a long, deep swallow of his and closed his eyes gratefully.
“Boy, is that good. Right this minute everything in Al World is good. That dope’s wonderful stuff. Addictive as hell, of course, but wonderful. It even suppresses the coughing a little. The pain’ll start creeping in again by midnight, but that should give us enough time to talk this through.” He sipped again and gave me a look of rueful amusement. “Human things are terrific right to the end, it seems like. I never would have guessed.”
“Al, what happens to that… that hole into the past, if they pull your trailer and build an outlet store where it was?”
“I don’t know that any more than I know how I can buy the same meat over and over again. What Ithinkis it’ll disappear. I think it’s as much a freak of nature as Old Faithful, or that weird balancing rock they’ve got in western Australia, or a river that runs backward at certain phases of the moon. Things like that are delicate, buddy. A little shift in the earth’s crust, a change in the temperature, a few sticks of dynamite, and they’re gone.”
“So you don’t think there’ll be… I don’t know… some kind of cataclysm?” What I was picturing in my mind was a breach in the cabin of an airliner cruising at thirty-six thousand feet, and everything being sucked out, including the passengers. I saw that in a movie once.
“I don’t think so, but who can tell? All I know is that there’s nothing I can do about it, either way. Unless you want me to deed the place over to you, that is. I could do that. Then you could go to the National Historical Preservation Society and tell them, ‘Hey, guys, you can’t let them put up an outlet store in the courtyardof the old Worumbo mill. There’s a time tunnel there. I know it’s hard to believe, but let me show you.’?”
For a moment I actually considered this, because Al was probably right: the fissure leading into the past was almost certainly delicate. For all I knew (orhedid), it could pop like a soap bubble if the Aluminaire was even joggled hard. Then I thought of the federal government discovering they could send special ops into the past to change whatever they wanted. I didn’t know if that were possible, but if so, the folks who gave us fun stuff like bio-weapons and computer-guided smart bombs were the last folks I’d want carrying their various agendas into living, unarmored history.
The minute this idea occurred to me—no, the verysecond—I knew what Al had in mind. Only the specifics were missing. I set my iced tea aside and stood up.
