Dead Man's Hand (7 page)

“I am a traveler, ma'am.”

“A traveler?” said Mr. Dickerson, sounding displeased. “You mean a migrant?”

“Bob, please,” said Mrs. Dickerson.

Clive sensed he was on dangerous ground. “I have been a stevedore, a fireman, and a roustabout,” he said. “I make my living where I can, sir. It may not be glamorous, but it's honest work.”

“Of course it is,” said the lady, her tone reproachful toward her husband. “And how terrible that you've been robbed! Oh, my goodness—are you hurt? I didn't even think to ask!”

“No, I'm all right,” Clive said, even as a memory of Jones's knife flashed in his mind.

“We could take you to a hospital—”

“No, no. Thank you, ma'am, but I am unhurt.”

Reminded of how unexpected that was, Clive fell into silent pondering. Where had Jones got hold of a trick knife? If indeed that was what he'd used. Maybe Clive should get one. He had a general dislike of weapons, but an item like that might prove to be handy.

The vehicle leaned to the left, following a curve in the roadway. Clive's stomach protested. He closed his eyes, hoping the queasiness would subside.

“What's a stevedore?” said Mr. Dickerson after a moment.

Clive took a deep breath and swallowed. “One who loads and unloads freight from a boat, sir.”

“Oh, a dock worker. Longshoreman?”

“I've worked on the rivers, mostly.”

“You a union man?”

“Absolutely, sir, of course. Though I was too young to fight in the war.” He didn't bother to add that his father and elder brother, who had fought in the war, had been Confederates.

A long, uncomfortable silence stretched out. Clive had the feeling he and the gentleman had not quite understood one another properly, but never mind. They would not be in company together for very long. An hour at most; Newark was a matter of six miles from Bloomfield, and this vehicle was traveling inordinately fast.

Even on the thought, the vehicle slowed and he cautiously opened his eyes again. There were more lights now, everywhere on both sides of the road. Lighted signs flashed by, too quickly to read. Trying made his head ache, so he kept his gaze forward.

“You said you'd been a fireman,” said Mrs. Dickerson in a kindly voice. “That's a hero's job.”

He hadn't quite thought of it that way, but then womenfolk tended to have romantic ideas. Maybe the thought of a man shoveling coal into the belly of a steamboat's boiler appealed to her.

“Why did you quit, if you don't mind my asking?” she said. “Was it nine eleven?”

“Ah—no, ma'am,” he said, wondering what the time of day had to do with anything. The thought made him reach for his watch chain, which he was unsurprised to find missing. He'd give Jones what for when next they met.

“I suppose I just got tired of all the soot,” he added.

“Oh, I see.”

“I'd do it again, if I needed work and the opportunity arose,” he added for the benefit of the husband.

“I'm sure you could find a job,” said Mrs. Dickerson. “They always need more firemen. It's such dangerous work.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

That was one of the reasons it wasn't his favorite way to earn a few dollars. He'd been on one steamboat whose boiler had exploded. On that occasion, he'd been traveling as a passenger, fortunately, and had escaped the misadventure intact, but a couple of the firemen had been scalded to death.

The vehicle slowed suddenly, and Clive instinctively grabbed at anything his hands could reach. The lashings held him to his seat as the vehicle swung hard around a corner. His stomach protested again. Had there been anything in it, he would surely have disgraced himself.

“Well, here we are,” said Mr. Dickerson.

The vehicle rolled to a stop. Clive peered out the window beside him and saw a long, low building with several peculiar-looking rail cars sitting in a row beyond it and one standing in front of it.

The rail car was uncoupled, sitting by itself on its strange, rounded black wheels. It was made of shiny silver metal, curved on all its edges, and had two bright lights on the front of it like the Dickersons' vehicle and all the others that he'd seen on the road.

Was this a railroad station? That was all right—he could get a train down to Camden, and from there take the spur out to Atlantic City. Except that he saw no tracks.

His benefactors were conferring in whispers again. Clive gazed around, trying to make sense of the lights and all the rest. Through the rain trickling on the window beside him, everything looked dreamlike, divorced from reality.

Mr. Dickerson shifted in his seat, then reached an arm over the back of it toward Clive. “Here's fifty dollars, that should be enough to get you a bus ticket and some breakfast and what not,” he said gruffly. “Don't gamble it away.”

“N-no, sir! Thank you, sir!” stammered Clive, amazed at both Mr. Dickerson's prescience and his generosity.

Fifty dollars! More than most poor fellows made in a month! Clive had had the good fortune to win as much or more at the gaming tables, but for charity it was an enormous sum.

“This is most generous of you, sir,” Clive said as he took the bills. They crinkled crisply in his fingers. “I am deeply in your debt. Might I have your direction? I'd like to repay you when I can.”

The gentleman harrumphed again and reached into his coat pocket. “Here's my card,” he said in a milder tone. “Good luck.”

“God bless,” added the lady.

“Thank you, and may God's blessings shower down upon you both,” Clive said, meaning it from his heart.

It was a satisfactory farewell all around. Unfortunately, Clive didn't know how to get out of the lashings, or the vehicle for that matter. He fumbled at his left side, where the lady had reached around him earlier.

“Push the orange button,” she said helpfully.

He saw no buttons anywhere, save on his own clothing. The only thing orange he could see was a square on the middle of a stub into which the lashings were tied. He obediently pushed on it, and the connection gave with a mechanical pop that made him jump. He untangled his arms from the straps and they slid away behind him as if pulled by some helpful ghost.

Clive shivered, reminded of exactly how strange all of this was: the vehicles, the roadway, the lights, the phantom steamboat. Yet other things were familiar, like the comforting crackle of the new bills in his hand.

He fumbled at the hatch, looking for a way to open it. Again the lady helped him, directing him to pull upward on a metal lever. The hatch popped open and Clive stepped out. The rain had subsided to a drizzle, and the strange electric lights gave a blue-gray cast to the buildings and the street and the rail cars.

“Goodbye, Clive,” said Mrs. Dickerson through her open window. “Good luck!”

The vehicle rolled backward away from him, then swerved to the side, its lights flashing in the puddles on the road. Clive could see Mrs. Dickerson smiling at him. He waved a hand in farewell, watched the vehicle execute an impossibly tight turn and drive away, then looked at his surroundings.

The low building had a strangely glowing sign that read “Bus Terminal.” He supposed he would be more comfortable inside it than out here in the drizzle, and maybe he could learn about the train timetables.

He cast a doubtful glance at the rail car. Now that he was outside with it, he could hear it rumbling in a way rather like the Dickersons' vehicle had done. Could rail cars now move under their own propulsion? He had spent a lot of time on riverboats lately, but he didn't think he'd been so very out of touch.

Maybe this was another dream. That made sense of all the things that didn't make sense.

He walked toward the building. The doors on the front of it were glass and had no handles that he could see. As he came near they slid apart to either side. Look as he might, he couldn't see who'd done it.

He walked into a large room lit by glowing panels set into the ceiling. Some were pink, some bluish, and one was flickering like a guttering candle. Rows of curiously rounded, unupholstered chairs sat mostly unoccupied, though there was a tramp hunched in one of them, softly snoring.

Clive walked over to a counter where an old negro clerk was punching at what looked like an accordion's keyboard. It made no music, only clicked. Perhaps it was intended for practice. Clive cleared his throat, and the clerk ceased tapping the keyboard and looked up with tired, watery eyes.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, I want to travel to Atlantic City.”

The clerk gazed at him. “Going to the casinos?”

Clive blinked, unsure how to answer. The clerk went back to playing on the keyboard and looking at a box that emitted a glowing light. Clive was about to take him to task when he spoke.

“Your best bet is to go up to the Port Authority and catch the casino bus. The casino gives you a bonus.”

Lost, Clive swallowed. “How much?”

“Five dollars to Port Authority. Then the casino bus will run you around thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five!”

Clive had thought Mr. Dickerson had been overgenerous. Apparently he had not.

“The bonuses are good. Twenty, twenty-five on the slots or the tables, depending which casino.” The clerk eyed him. “You want the ticket?”

Clive drew himself up haughtily. “Perhaps you could direct me to the nearest railway station.”

“Train's gonna cost you more. ‘Bout sixty dollars.”

“Sixty!”

Clive bit back a curse. It was a dream, only a dream. A very bad one. His fifty dollars was dream money, so why not spend it extravagantly? He could always dream up some more.

He wished, most sincerely, that he might wake up now.

He coughed. “Five dollars, you said?”

The clerk nodded. Clive handed over one of the crisp bills Mr. Dickerson had given him, though it cost his heart a bitter pang. The clerk paused to play at his accordion a little more, then handed Clive a small ticket printed with blue ink.

“Thank you.”

Clive stared at the ticket, trying to make sense of what it said. Newark, New York, and the times were understandable. A lot of other numbers weren't, and the date, “October 16, 2012,” was preposterous.

“This isn't the correct date,” Clive said.

The clerk took the ticket, peered at it, and handed it back. “Yes, it is.”

He gestured toward a calendar hanging on the wall behind him. Clive was momentarily distracted by the apparel—undergarments, and obscenely scant for those—of the woman pictured at the top of the page, then his gaze descended to the calendar heading: “October, 2012.”

“Oh,” he said.

Suddenly his mouth was filled with liquid fear. He swallowed, feeling weak.

“Don't forget your change,” the clerk said helpfully.

Clive numbly watched his hands move to pick up the bills, fold them, and slide them into his coat pocket. The feeling of the fabric on the back of his hand was very real. Nothing else seemed to be.

Hanging beside the calendar was a clock face that read 9:26. That was perfectly normal, nothing wrong with that except that the face seemed to run without the benefit of any workings of a clock. He watched the second hand tick its way around. It frightened him. Everything frightened him.

He put the little printed ticket into his other pocket and turned away from the counter. Walked slowly to the nearest row of chairs, touching one to make sure it was real. It felt solid enough, so he sat down in it, after which his limbs turned to water.

This was a very, very bad dream. If it was a dream at all.

That was what frightened him the most—the slowly dawning realization that all this strangeness was part of a waking truth he did not have the heart to face. That he might not be dreaming, but had somehow been transported over a hundred years into the future.

Could Orson Jones have done that to him? No. Jones was an unremarkable river pilot. This madness was more like the concoction of a storyteller. Like Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, only in the wrong direction.

Clive laughed under his breath. Thinking of that yarn made him feel unexpectedly better. The story was a complete fabrication, so much balderdash, yet it gave him a sense of context. As if the place—the
time
, he amended—where he found himself were not so completely outlandish.

Not Twain. Washington Irving. Rip Van Winkle.

Had he slept a hundred years and more, untouched by time? He doubted that. He remembered distinctly Orson Jones's attack—and maybe it had not been a disappearing blade after all—and he also remembered the sensation of being dragged. Dragged along the roadway, then into a field. Dragged for a long time, during which he had lost consciousness, for it was the last thing he remembered before awakening tonight.

Could Jones have killed him, after all? A shiver went through him and he closed his eyes. His mouth was dry, his breathing short.

Come now, Sebastian. Come, pull yourself together, man. If you were dead you wouldn't be here. Heaven perhaps, hell more likely.

This was neither. This was … strange.

A hundred years in the future everything should be perfect. There should be no filth, no tramps sleeping in hard chairs, no dinginess to this room beneath the flickering light, no faint smell of urine in the corners. If the future was so dismal, he wanted no part of it.

Atlantic City would be better, perhaps. He was going there, certain. He took out the ticket again and held it in his hands, staring at it as he tried to convince himself it was real and not part of a dreadful dream.

 

 

 

Queens, New York

A
rnold Rothstein awoke with the sound of an automobile engine in his ears. He opened his eyes and saw nothing—he was wrapped in a sheet.

Fighting panic, he struggled until he got the sheet loose enough to free his arms. He had to roll back and forth, and in doing so realized he was outdoors.