Second Chance (50 page)

He turned and saw Frank and Diane and Curly and Eddie sitting in a small circle, and his first thought was to wonder, with a surge of panic, what went wrong, why they were back. He was just about to speak when Frank went on. "These damn séances never work, stoned or straight."

Then he realized that the past had reclaimed itself, that the people he was seeing were not the friends of twenty-four years hence, but the friends of now, of a fall night in 1969.

"God, they're back," he said softly, then turned to Tracy. "They must have
made
it."

"What?"

Her expression curled the hairs on the back of his neck. It was a look of quizzical humor, the look a college girl would give a boyfriend who was putting her on, a look that told him he was alone, a stranger in another time.

"You've forgotten," he said.

"Forgotten what?" Her eyebrows drew together, but the teasing smile remained.

He smiled himself. It would still be all right. "Don't worry," he said. "I still remember. And I can't forget," and he patted his jeans pocket.

He felt different, younger not only outside but inside too, as though the cares and concerns of adult life had not yet borne down upon him.

"Forget
what
?" she asked.

"Forget this," and he reached into his pocket and felt the piece of paper on which he had written everything important—the trip back in time, the date of the ROTC building bombing, the deaths, the fact that Keith would become Pan, everything that he would need to remember, and need to make Tracy believe, so that, even if he forgot, their future could still be changed, could still be happy.

"You're not gonna believe this," he said, in an intonation that had grown higher and so much younger. He took out the single white sheet of paper and opened it, opened it and looked at it and saw that it was a flyer from the Iselin Theatre that advertised the forthcoming
Midnight Cowboy
,
Putney Swope
, and
True Grit
.

"The paper . . . it didn't exist back then . . ." he said to himself. "Didn't exist
now
. . . oh Jesus . . . oh Christ . . ."

He was forgetting. What did he mean, back then? Something about time, about Tracy and Keith and the ROTC building. He could barely recall why he was so upset, but he knew that if he got a pen and thought real hard that he could probably remember enough to write down on the back of the flyer what was really important.

"A pen," he said, and went into the dining room, but there was no pen there. He tossed aside piles of underground comics, textbooks, and
Rolling Stone
, whose tabloid pages were supple and pure white, then went into the hall, nearly tripping on a tied up Keith Aarons mumbling through his gag, and Woody wondered what the hell Keith was doing like that, but he couldn't stop, couldn't stop because he had to find a pen and write down something important, so very important, and Dale was coming out of the bedroom, and Woody passed him, and yeah, there in the bedroom on the dresser, yeah, was a nineteen cent
Bic
, and he grabbed it and flattened out the folded flyer on the dresser top and held the pen over the paper and . . .

. . . couldn't remember why he was there.

His mind was empty, empty of everything but young Woody Robinson's time, young Woody Robinson's existence.

He thought as hard as he could, but the voices in the hall broke his concentration:

"You were stoned, man . . ."

"Yeah, started
sayin
'
somethin
' about destroying the world and shit—"

"Bullshit! What are you
talking
about, Curly?"

"Hey, Keith, you had a bad trip, okay? So we just tied you up so you couldn't hurt yourself . . ."

"Fuck you, man . . ."

The voices moved toward the living room, but it was too late now. It just wouldn't come. The pen hovered over the paper for a moment longer, and then he set it down, thinking that he had lost something very important.

The front door opened, and he heard Alan and
Sharla
and Judy come in with the pizzas. Maybe he should just forget about it, go out and have a beer and some pizza. But still, it had seemed so
important
.

"What's with you, jazz man?"

He looked up and saw Tracy standing in the doorway.

"You look like the only one who saw a ghost at the séance." She put her hand on his hand that had held the pen.

"I thought . . ." he said slowly. "I thought I remembered . . . that there was something I had to write down. And I came in here for a pen . . . and I forgot what it was."

"Maybe a tune?" she suggested.

He thought for a moment, then recalled a snatch of melody that he had written in another world, and hummed it. "That's pretty," she said. "What is it?"

He shrugged. "You like it, it's
your
song."

She kissed the tip of his nose. "Thanks. I
like
my song.”

“But that's not what I came in here to write down."

"Don't worry about it. If it's important, you'll remember."

She put her arms around him and gave him a hard hug. "There's one thing," he said. "One thing that I do remember."

"What's that?"

"That I'm not supposed to leave you. No matter where you go, or what you do, I'm gonna stay with you."

"I hope so. I hope you do."

"I will." He shook his head at the wonder of her. "Dear God, I love you, Tracy."

"Love you, Woody."

Chapter 49

On a warm May evening, twenty-four years later, a group of people in their mid-forties found themselves in a shabby, poorly furnished room at the end of a journey they had started long before. Although only four people started that journey, seven completed it.

Sharla
Jackson, garbed in camouflage gear, now sat between Curly and Eddie. Alan Franklin, ablaze in
Carnaby
Street colors, sat next to his wife, holding her hand, and looking at her face as though it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. And Judy McDonald sat between Frank and Curly, and when she saw her husband she sobbed and pressed herself into his arms.

"It worked," Curly said in awe. "It really did."

"I'm . . . alive."
Sharla
touched her own face, and ran her hands down her neck and chest, and let the feel of her heartbeat stop her.

"Oh God," whispered Alan. "What I did . . . did it . . . what
happened
?"

"You didn't," Curly said. "You didn't kill that senator. And
Sharla
, you didn't hold your class hostage, and Judy didn't go nuts in her gallery."

"But I remember it," Judy said, clinging to Frank. "I
remember
it, Curly."

Curly looked down at the carpet, remembering, thinking back through the years, back once, twice. And again. After a moment he looked back up, and the others saw a tear in his eye. "Yeah. I remember too. Just like we all remember Keith and Tracy dying together, and Woody's life in music. Just like we remember Tracy
alive
, and the world Pan lived in. But what else? What else do we remember
now
?" He glared at all of them with a dreadful intensity.

"
Look
," he said. "And
remember
."

They all concentrated, thought back, and knowledge and new memory settled on them like an outwardly soft coat lined with barbs.

"It's another," Frank said. "Dear God, another memory." Diane nodded. "Tracy and Keith . . . they died. They both died this time, but Woody . . ."

"Yeah," Curly said. "Woody died with them. The three of them, together." He smiled. "He did what he said he would. He didn't leave her again."

"I remember." Frank put a hand over his eyes. "Tracy and Woody said they had a date that night, but they didn't come back. And Keith went with them—they said they were giving him a ride to the Student Union. And then I heard the sirens, and the police came . . ."

Sharla
continued their shared memory. "They identified the bodies, except for Woody. He took most of the blast. But Tracy and Keith . . . them they could tell."

"And now there's no Pan," Eddie said. "Keith's really dead." Then he added sadly, "And so is Dale."

"And so is Woody," Curly said. "Dead for over twenty years." He cocked his head like a teacher testing his students. "So who planned this party?"

Alan pointed at Curly. "You did. You called us, told us what a great time we'd have—" He paused, then laughed in disbelief. "It's
May
! I just remembered, it's still only
May
."

"That's
right
," Frank said. "Because what happened between the first party and the second one . . . didn't . . .
couldn't
, not if Woody was dead. But we had to
have
the party, because we had to have, what, a
reason
maybe, a reason to be here?"

"Too many questions," said Diane. "Dozens of them. Like why did we become young right away the last time?"

"Maybe," said Curly, "because we knew what was happening. We were expecting it. Maybe it was something
we
did. Christ, why did any of it happen in the first place?"

"You forget," Eddie said. "It
didn't
."

~*~

The next day Curly Rider drove into
Colver
, Pennsylvania, and stopped his car in front of a small, white frame house. Across the street, hidden among trees, was another house, with a
For Sale or Rent
sign stuck in the soil of the
unmowed
lawn.

When Curly got out of the car, a dog that was chained to a stake in the front yard of the white house began to bark, and an old man holding a taped baseball bat came out the front door.

Curly got back into the car, started the engine, and drove away, ignoring the shouts of the old man. "Rooney's fine, Woody," Curly said with a grin. "Rooney is just fine."

~*~

Eight months after that May night, Al Freeman went into the office of Dr. Charles Goncourt to give him the bad news. When he finished, the old man stuck out his lower lip.

"No way then."

"No sir, I'm afraid not. The virus is fatal, and it's airborne, but there just isn't a unique Caucasian gene that it'll respond to as an antibody. No matter what we've done to it, it's killed every white subject we've tried it on. Ted Horst and Bob Hastings and I all agree that it's simply not efficient to continue, that the danger it poses is far greater than any chance that we'll be able to make it into what we need. We could keep working on it for decades and never find the answer."

"Damn," Goncourt said. "Damn, damn, damn." Finally he nodded. "All right then. Eradicate it completely. We can't take any chance on its ever being released. It could mean the end of civilization, and after all . . ." He smiled thinly. ". . . we're not madmen. We'll just have to start again."

"Yes sir. You can bet your bottom dollar that's just what we'll do."

Chapter 50

On a Saturday night in the following May, seven friends had dinner in a restaurant in Iselin. It was Alumni Weekend, and they had all returned to campus and met there at Bruno's, to eat manicotti and salad with the special blue cheese dressing, and to talk about their old friends.

Two of them had made changes in their lives. Alan had left his position with the tobacco industry and was now lobbying at lower pay for an environmental organization. "Going through what we did—and what
I
did," he explained to the others, "makes you see things differently. I really
might
have gone
nutzoid
after a while. I was dealing with Congress, dealing with guilt, and dealing with my bosses at the same time. This way, I at least eliminate the middle man. How about you,
Sharla
? That old devil guilt a factor in your move?"

Sharla
smiled. For the past nine months she had been teaching learning disabled children in one of the Cleveland city schools. "Not really. Just felt like a challenge again. Sometimes I hate it, sometimes I love it. When I was in the suburbs, I just
did
it.

"Did you think," Alan asked Curly, who had made the initial calls, "about meeting at the apartment at all?"

"No. I don't ever want to see that place again. The present—
this
present's just fine. With one or two sorely missed exceptions."

"It's not all that much better," said Eddie, swirling the ice cubes in his bourbon. "The things that Keith hated are still around. We could kill ourselves yet."

"Yeah, we could," said Judy. "Maybe we will. But this way the decision's ours. And maybe we can still save ourselves too."

The waiter brought a wine bucket, and presented Curly with a cork and a small amount in a glass. Curly sniffed the cork, sipped, grinned, said, "Yep, that's wine all right," and the others laughed. Then the sommelier filled the glasses while Curly held up a hand, as if signaling to someone at the other end of the room.