From Time to Time

4

JUST PAST NINE O’CLOCK NEXT morning, he turned off the throughway onto an asphalt-paved county road. Ten more miles, then off onto a narrower, winding, weed-bordered road, once paved but potholed now, chunks of asphalt missing. The final eleven miles took over half an hour. Out of a last slow curve, and the road turned into concrete-paved Main Street, Winfield, Vermont.

Rube drove slowly through a block, head ducked to stare ahead through the windshield, then swung into an angled parking space. He got out, feeling in his pocket for meter change, but every meter flag in the block showed red, no other car parked; and on ahead for three blocks, only two cars, both pickups. Hell with it, he thought, probably don’t even bother collecting anymore.

On the sidewalk he stood glancing both ways. Nothing moved in the entire five-block length of Main Street, no one in sight. The walk lay silent in the morning sun, his foreshortened shadow slanted toward the curb; he turned to walk on, hearing no sound but his own footsteps.

In the block ahead, a man in blue jeans, dark plaid shirt, and a yellow good-old-boy visored cap walked out from a storefront, and on across the walk. He was young, big, wore a thick Zapata mustache, was heavy and big-bellied. He climbed up into a red pickup with enormous tires, and when he slammed his door the tinny crash bounced between the storefront walls, the only sound in the street till he started his engine and drove off.

Rube walked on past a men’s clothing store, one of its two display windows paved with work shoes, cowboy and pull-on boots. Past two bars into which he could not see. Past storefronts boarded over with plywood sheets so weathered the outer layers were separating in narrow swollen bulges. Most of the buildings he passed were two stories, a few three. Some of the upper windows were labeled: a doctor, a lawyer, a chiropractor. Rounded bay windows hung out over the walk at some corners, their separate roofs steeply conical. He glanced down the side streets as he crossed them: houses, wooden and old. Many had porches elaborately ornamented at the eaves, but the ornamentation was often broken, pieces missing. None of the houses had been painted in a long time, and a few were covered over with green asphalt shingling. The front windows of one were curtained with a gray blanket and a sun-faded quilt. The lawns were gone, only chopped-down weeds and winter mud marks, often tracked by car wheels. Cars stood on a few of these former lawns, others on dirt or cinder driveways. All were old, big, American. All sun-faded, dented, some listing. A new high-wheeled pickup stood parked in the street, one set of wheels up over the curb.

On past a little stucco movie theater, its shallow poster-display cases empty, the glass broken, its marquee letters reading, Closed. At a corner, a small grocery store, door open. Just inside, a low showcase crowded with bottles: dozens of brands of whiskey, gin, vodka, brandy. All were half-pints, and the sliding glass doors of the case were padlocked. Rube walked in, nodding at the middle-aged clerk. “Do you have a city directory?”

The man shook his head, eyes amused. “Isn’t any.”

“Is there a city hall?”

“Nope. No more. No city anymore, friend. We’re just county now. Who you lookin’ for?”

“John McNaughton.”

The man shook his head. “Nope.”

Out on the street corner, Rube stood glancing around again. Just ahead the street divided to angle right and left around a little square slightly higher than the street, its cut-stone curbing angled outward by frost, pieces missing. The square had been paved over, the asphalt now broken, patches of dirt showing, remnants of white-painted striping still visible, the ghosts of old parking spaces.

What now? Coffee. Just ahead, Larry’s Place, and he walked on to it, looked in. It was open: aproned proprietor behind the counter, a counter customer hunched over his coffee. Rube went in, ordering coffee as he sat down at the counter, glancing at the other customer as the man turned to look at him. “Major! Major Prien! My God, how are you!”

“Why, I’m fine, John, just fine,” Rube said easily, but—did he really know this man?

Who smiled and said, “Not quite sure about me, are you, Major?” He was big, broad-backed, maybe forty, wearing a threadbare brown suitcoat over a gray flannel shirt. Sliding his coffee cup on in advance, he moved to the stool beside Rube, saying, “Take a good look.”

An old-fashioned face, Rube thought, thin, tight-skinned, permanently weathered. The way Americans used to look, with haircut to match, no sissy sideburns but economically clipped high on the sides, a real last-a-month whitewall. “You look like a World War One doughboy.”

“Feel like one sometimes. Well? You know me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. You look like a hick; are you?”

“Depends. On occasion and within limits I can be a kind of rural Noel Coward. But yeah, by inclination I’m a hick. The haircut’s no disguise, it’s me.”

“You’re smart, though.”

“Well, yes, though I wouldn’t call for a new deal if I were dumb. Because it wouldn’t matter; I’d go along just about the way I do anyway. I’m a simple man, I like the simple life, so there’s no real need to be smart. Kind of a waste, actually. I have to be smart enough to stay simple and not get all dissatisfied. The way I’d be anyway if I were dumb. You follow me?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe I’m not smart enough.”

“And what are your hobbies and favorite sports, Major?”

“Well, John, I like things to go my way. And I work at it harder and longer than most. What I don’t like is anyone trying to jerk me around. So just tell me; I think maybe I know you, but I’m not sure: jog my memory.”

“Remember Kay Veach? Thin, black-haired girl?”

Rube shook his head.

“From the Project. I phoned her; lives in Wyoming. But she didn’t remember me or the Project. How about Nate Dempster? Around thirty? Bald. Wore glasses.” Rube shook his head again. “Also from the Project, and also didn’t remember it or me. Oscar Rossoff?”

“Oscar, yeah. I phoned him. He said you’d called. And gave me your name.”

“Did he now?” McNaughton smiled. “Oscar was a little unhappy with me. Couldn’t quite remember me. Or the Project. Almost! But—no. Got mad when I pushed him about the Project.”

“The Project, the Project. What the hell is the Project!”

“Well.” McNaughton tasted his coffee, made a face, setting it down. “You never quite get used to how bad this stuff really is. Picture a big building, Major Prien. Fills a whole city block. Made of brick, no windows. On the outside says, Beekey’s Moving and Storage, phone number, stuff like that. But that’s only a front: inside, the building is gutted. Every floor but the top one ripped out, and the top one turned into offices. Underneath, just a hollow shell of brick walls, a block square. And down on the floor—”

“The Big Floor.”

“Yeah! You’re doing good! Down on the Big Floor, something like movie sets. Separated by walls. An Indian tepee on a stretch of prairie, walls painted to look like more. World War One trenches in another, a barbed-wire no-man’s-land stretching away in front. An actual house in another. An exact replica of a house right here in Winfield, but the way it was in the twenties. And a man living in it: me.” He sat grinning at Rube.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m all ears.”

“Real Crow Indians living in the tepee; had to be taught the language, though. Guys in the trenches wearing 1917 U.S. Army uniforms. All of us getting the feel of how it was, you see. Before we moved out into the real thing. Indians out onto an enormous stretch of real prairie. Doughboys in France in genuine World War One trenches restored. Because the Project, Major, was a search for a way to move back in time.”

He sat waiting but Rube outwaited him, looking at him expressionlessly, and McNaughton smiled, leaning closer. “It was you, Major, who first told me all this, the first day I joined the Project. Standing up on the catwalk over the Big Floor; you could walk anywhere on the catwalks and look down on the sets. Big banks of lights up there to imitate day, night, cloudy, sunny, rain, anything. Machinery to control temperatures: winter on one set, heat wave on another. You and I stood up there looking down, me brand-new to the Project. You said that according to Einstein, time is like a narrow winding river. And we’re all in a boat. All we can see around us is the present. But back in the bends behind us the past still exists. Can’t see it, but it’s there; really there, Einstein said. And meant it. Well, Dr. Danziger—”

“What were his initials?”

“E. E.”

“Right! Right: E. E. Danziger.”

“Major, let’s get out of here, the guy’s starting to listen. Pay him for—what does he call this stuff? Coffee, I think.”

Outside they crossed the street to a lone bench in the little paved-over square. “Danziger said that if the past really exists—and Einstein says it does—there ought to be a way to reach it. Took him two years but he got money for the Project. From the federal government.”

“Where else?”

“Well, who pays you?”

Rube smiled.

“He got, must have been a few million. Built the Project, and, Major, they bought this town, the whole town. Couldn’t have been many holdouts, because look at this garbage dump. Out here in the middle of nothing but played-out farmland going back to brush. Nobody here anymore but drunks, druggies, and dropouts. Can’t make it anywhere else, come up here, get on welfare, and drink. Or raise marijuana on land don’t belong to them. Misfits. No-goods.”

“Including you?”

“Why not? But the Project restored this whole town to the way it was in the twenties.” He sat watching Rube make a show of looking around at the dilapidated town, and smiled. “Oh, it doesn’t look like it now, I know. Kind of a mystery here, Major, but one thing at a time. Take my word for it, they restored this place, made it a ‘Gateway’—as Dr. D called them. Makes it easier to slip from the simulation into the real thing. I did it. Made the transition to the real Winfield of the twenties. Damn few can do it, Major. You couldn’t. Tried, but couldn’t do it. But a few of us could, and I was one, and Major . . . it took me where I’d wanted to be all my life. You should see this little town in the twenties. Beautiful, so beautiful. Quiet dirt roads, trees, trees everywhere. And a drugstore that—”

“Spare me the nostalgia.”

“I hate that word. You know who uses it mostly? Time patriots. Same people who live in the best country in the world. Must be the best because that’s where they live. And they live in the best of times; has to be best because it’s their lifetime. You even suggest there just might have been better times than here and now, and it’s ‘nostalgia, nostalgia.’ Don’t even know what the word means. Means overly sentimental, for crysakes.”

“Give ’em hell, John.”

“What I’ll give you is the present—look at this street. But you should see it—oh Lord, you should see it in the twenties. Saturday night, say; in the summertime. Main Street here jammed; townspeople, farmers in from the country. They knew each other, stopped to talk. Someone else would come along and join in, and there’d be a little group on the walk. Not like the damn shopping malls. Go to a shopping mall a hundred times, and it’s always mostly strangers you never saw before, and never see again. In the twenties this miserable dead little square was beautiful; trees, grass, shrubbery, paths, green benches, and people. Some of the farmers came in buggies or wagons. Hitching posts along the curbs, not parking meters. There were cars, sure. Mostly Model Ts. But I had a job, mechanic at Pierce-Arrow.”

“Surprised you could stand the cars, John. All those nasty exhaust fumes.”

“Maybe so. Maybe twenty, thirty years earlier Winfield is even better. Be happy to go see. Major, I have got to get back, got to.”

“Why the hell did you leave?”

“The stuff that killed the cat, if you can believe it. I came back to the present, just for a day or so, I thought, to see what was happening at the Project. You took the Project over, you know.

Once it succeeded. You and Esterhazy. Forced Danziger out. Too cautious for you: he worried about altering events in the past because you couldn’t tell, he said, how the change might affect the present. Dangerous. But you and Esterhazy were rubbing your hands! Couldn’t wait to try it, and find out what would happen. But what I came back to, Major, was this. It’s no Gateway anymore. I can’t get back from this!”

“John, it’s sure interesting, all this stuff. And you tell it so well! But I’ve been to your Project. Yesterday. And Beekey’s Moving and Storage warehouse is a moving and storage warehouse. And always has been. You can see that with one look!”

“That’s true. In a way.”

“And it took fifty years for this stinking town to get like this; it’s never been restored!”

“Also true. In a way.”

“Pretty good way!”

McNaughton nodded several times, then said, “Major, four, five weeks ago I took the bus to Montpelier. State capital. Walked to the state library, and they got out a back file of the Winfield Messenger for me. They’ve got it all, 1851 to 1950; paper couldn’t quite last out the full century. I got the volume for 1920 through 1926, and stole something from it, cut it out of the paper. And I keep it with me all the time. Because it’s all I’ve got left now.” From his inside coat pocket he brought out a trimmed-down manila folder, and handed it to Rube.

Rube opened it. Taped to the inside lay a three-column-wide section of newspaper. A portion of the masthead across the top read, essenger, and just below that, between two rules, the date, June 1, 1923. Below this, the caption over a photograph, which Rube read aloud, “ ‘Crowd Throngs Parade Route.’ ” He bent over the photograph, examining it: several ranks and files of marching young men, rifles on shoulders, all wearing shallow metal helmets and high-necked uniform blouses. Preceding them, two more uniformed men carrying the American flag and a banner. Rube read aloud the banner’s inscription, “ ‘American Legion Post—’ ”

“Not the parade, the spectators.”

He saw it immediately: along the curb between the thick trunks of old trees stood a lineup of men, women, children, dogs. Among them a tall man wearing a flat, black-ribboned straw hat. And under its stiff brim, smiling at the camera—sharp, clear, unmistakable—the face of the man beside him.

Who nodded, reaching for his folder. “Yep. Me. Right here in Winfield. On this very street. Watching the Memorial Day parade in the spring of 1923. There’s no Project now, Major; it doesn’t exist. But there was. It did.”

“Fine. Then why don’t I remember it? You do, you say.”

“Something happened, Major. Something happened back in the past that altered the present.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Anything. When it happened, I was back in the past where it didn’t touch me. I took my memories with me, and brought them back. But they didn’t match the present anymore. I came back, but not to the restored Winfield. I came back to this untouched garbage dump. And went crazy. Got myself to New York, and ran the last block to the Project. And found Beekey’s Moving and Storage, nothing else. And worst of all”—he leaned toward Rube, lowering his voice—“worst of all, Danziger didn’t exist. Wasn’t in the phone book. And at the library I looked through their old phone book file back to 1939. No E. E. Danziger. Ever. No record of his birth at City Hall. And no one ever heard of him at Harvard. He didn’t exist!”

“He did it . . .” Rube was slowly standing, his face turning red. “Oh, that son of a bitch. He did it!”

“Who?”

“Why . . . Marley? Morley! Simon Morley! We sent him back, didn’t we? Into the nineteenth century on a . . . mission. And he did this!”

“Did what?”

“Why . . . I don’t know.” He stood looking helplessly at McNaughton. “Something. Did something, back in the past, so that . . . Danziger was never born. No Project now. And never was.” He sat down, and the two men stared at the deserted street ahead. Then Rube said, “John, what keeps you here in this nothing place?”

“My job. Part-time mechanic. At subscale pay. And the cheapest room this side of Calcutta.”

“You ever do any fighting? Boxing, I mean?”

“Some. In the Army.”

“Heavyweight?”

“Mostly. I pared down to light-heavy once, but I was young and could do it. Won easy. A supply sergeant, and soft. We showed the same on the scales but I outweighed him in the bones.”

“Pretty good, were you?”

“Not bad. Won more than I lost, but I lost some too. Knocked out twice, and I quit. Wanted to keep what brains I got.”

“You ever kill anybody?

“Never actually did. I was going to once but the situation changed. I would have done it, though. I had it all thought out.”

“This in the Army?”

“Yeah. But he got promoted, and transferred. Lucky for him. And me too, no doubt.”

“Is there anything you wouldn’t do, John, to get back? To the other Winfield?”

“Nothing. There is nothing I wouldn’t do.”

“Do you know how Simon Morley got back to the nineteenth century?”

“He was tutored. Learned all about it, got the feel of it. Then used the Dakota as his Gateway.”

“The Dakota?”

“A New York apartment building. It was there in the nineteenth century, and it’s there today. The Project furnished an apartment in the Dakota, got him the right wardrobe, made it a Gateway—”

“Could you do it? Get back there where Morley is?”

“Sure.” He grinned. “If you can do the thing, you can do it, Major. That your car up the street, the Toyota?” Rube nodded. “Looks a little snug for me.”

“They fit the Japanese, John.”

“I’ll manage.” He stood up, inches taller than Rube. “Run me over to my place. Give me five minutes to pack my stuff. Three, if I hurry. And I’ll hurry. Believe me, I’ll hurry.”